And if I start a commotion
by Mrs Fruitcake
Summary: One crime family. Three criminals falling for Gene and Alex. GALEX. Follows on from Playing with the big boys - may be a bit confusing if you haven't read that one . Please read and review.
1. Chapter 1

**Hi there. This story is the third in a series of six connected stories. The plots don't make a whole lot of sense if you haven't read them in order. The two stories before this one are London Fields and Playing with the Big Boys.**

_**I**_

Dorothy Lange, crime lord.

"It's just not really a crime lord kind of name." Lange, Hunt practiced saying it – Long-ee – and stared at her mug-shot. Dorothy's arrest for fencing stolen goods in 1977 must have caught her in between visits to her hair-dresser because the women staring out in mild surprise sported a short, thick, frizzed blonde perm that had flattened out at her dark roots.

"That family tree tells its own story, wouldn't you say?"

Hmmm … Hunt stood back from the white board, which had Dorothy at its centre surrounded by twenty or more photos of members of her family. Some had been captured for mug shots, some in surveillance. Six of the photos had a red 'X' marked over the faces.

"According to her tax return," Assistant Commissioner Adrien Vanderzee slapped a folder into his hands, "Dorothy runs a loss-making cab business covering Stepney and surrounding areas of the East End. Go pretty much anywhere within a five mile radius of her business and every single person will tell you she's a lovely person and shut their door in your face."

Hunt had to admit grim tidings had visited Dorothy Lange's family often over the past 10 years. The red Xs represented one husband dead of a heart attack, three nephews bottled or stabbed, a son taken by leukemia at age 15, and her second son found three days ago with five bullets in his chest.

"What kind of names are they?" He pointed to the photos of her six sons. Evariste. Charles. Marc. Roger. Didier. Achille. No idea how that last one was pronounced.

"Dorothy's second husband – the heart-attack victim – was Alain Michaux, originally from Marseille and in England illegally. She had her first child with him at age 35, and then another five sons all named after Alain's uncles. Hence the fact you can't pronounce them."

Hunt turned away from the whiteboard. "So, beside her trying to sell some dodgy bicycle tires in 1977 why are you interested in her?"

"Dorothy got off that fencing charge," Vanderzee replied. "She's never been convicted of anything."

The photo showed him a woman tough enough to birth six children and ravaged by the effort, a broiler red face even back in 1977, he thought. Her eyebrows had been plucked to a thin arching line.

"I've been looking into this lady for a few months." Vanderzee nodded to the stack of files waiting for Hunt. "Now I'm being told it's not a priority for the Met so my resourcing is being pulled. We've watched this entire family for months so the timing is horrible. But trying to do something preventative is expensive, and frankly no one cares about the gangland wars we _could_ prevent. Not here anyway."

"Poor kid with the cancer aside, these bastards should be rubbing each other out. Sir, if they were to sit around playing Russian Roulette in their kitchen, what kind of preventative measures would you take? Me, I'd prevent them from walking away by putting six bloody bullets in the chamber."

Adrien Vanderzee's moment of silence reminded Hunt that the man had no sense of humour. Jokes wasted time, and he hadn't called Hunt up to the fifteenth floor to spend a leisurely hour. In fact, Vanderzee seemed anxious to get them out of his office.

Them. The women in the room, who had been sitting silently in the corner with her arms crossed. Vanderzee waved a hand her way without looking at her.

"Annette Simock is my only resource left on this case. She's been working in one of Lange's clubs for the past six months. Now with those introductions underway, you and she can plan out how you are going to get me some results within your existing baselines."

His index finger jabbed the photo of the newly dead Charles Michaux. "Three days ago, Charles here stepped outside his door to find a motorcyclist with a gun. Being the gentleman he is, Charles grabbed a teenage girl passing by and used her as a shield. Didn't stop him dying unfortunately, or her."

Hunt paused beside the white board again. "I guess we'll stop by the funeral."

"It's on Thursday at St Mary Martyrfields," Annette said. East End accent, he noted. Chippy sounding.

Vanderzee saw him to the door of his office. "It may be a mystery to the Met how these stupid crime family wars start, but I can see the beginnings right here. Someone targeted Charles because he was Dorothy Lange's favourite son. Presumably wanting to start one of those vicious little wars that wreck the neighbourhoods they want to control."

He waited until Annette had got half-way down the corridor. "It's been a month, Hunt. I've been waiting for Chief Super Paulson to inform me that his unfortunate experiment in progressive recruitment has been transferred elsewhere."

Hunt looked down at his driving gloves. "It's fine, sir. Under control. DI Drake is doing a lot of filing."

* * *

DI Drake had in fact been doing exactly as she pleased. Willfully ignoring his orders. Using the terms "cognitive dissonance" and "borderline behavioral disorder" despite warnings. Ignoring his **specific **order to conduct an audit of the office's evidence storage practices. Thieving the Quattro when she could get the keys. And ignoring another specific order to "buy a shirt that covers both sides of your bloody shoulders at once".

_No change there then._

_And life is good_, Hunt concluded, as he sat back in his chair and the man reflected back in his computer nodded, _I'm in control of this floor and I say who comes and goes. _To confirm that exact thought, Chris Skelton came in a minute later with the results of the research exercise Hunt had asked him to conduct.

"Ah, it's a minute in basically."

"Good. Worth staying til the end?'

"Uh no. Not unless you want to see a bloke in shiny gold armour."

"Date movie?

Chris shook his head.

"You'd see it again?"

"Uhh … it was kind of frightening."

Hunt nodded thoughtfully. "You'll see it again."

"Yes, Guv."

Hunt breezed out through the office, pulling his coat on. "Wrap up, Raymondo. It's bitter out there."

Alex Drake looked up from her desk. "Are you heading out for a case?"

"Why no, DI Drake." He pulled his driving gloves on. "We're going on a cultural excursion. Not quite _A Midsummer Night's Dream _though."

"Great." She made to rise. "Where's Shaz? We can all go. What is it?"

"_Excalibur_," Chris said miserably.

"Oh." Alex sat down again. "Never mind, Shaz. We'd best not interfere with their male bonding rituals. They want to hold hands in a dark theatre while women in see-through gauze get pole-axed by Arthurian knights."

"I'll be there for the historical depiction, Drake." And Hunt clapped his arms around the shoulders of Carling and Skelton and marched them out the doors.

* * *

Alex dropped her pen and sat back in her chair. It was like all the energy had been sucked out of the office. It had annoyed her a little because she couldn't put her finger on it. She stared absently at Shaz who was concentrating on typing. Hunt had been just that **little **less grim, just a bit less bored since their return from the...she blew out a long breath at the horrible memory...Brighton conference.

_I could flatter myself and assume it's about me._ But, somehow she didn't think it entirely was.

She finally recalled herself. She'd been staring at Shaz for a good minute and now Shaz was looking back. "Oh sorry." She picked up the pen again. "Shaz, what's Chris been saying about work lately?"

* * *

Hunt switched on the car engine in the picture theatre's underground carpark. "Are you quite sure there's nothing else worth seeing after the first half hour, Chris? Got to say Drake had it right about the pole-axing. That dozy bird in the opening bits didn't know what hit her, did she?"

He could tell that Ray would have happily stayed until the end of _Excalibur_, but he said nothing as they drove out into a street teeming with wintry rain gusts and rapidly flooding gutters. "Where are we off to now?" Ray asked finally as it became clear they were headed in the opposite direction of CID.

"It's a perfect day for a funeral, don't you think." Hunt enjoyed their confusion for a moment. "I didn't come out with you two this afternoon just to sit in the Odeon with those weirdos and pervs. We've got a job on." He caught Chris's attention in the rear-view mirror. "And you, Zippy the minute man, are going to keep your big gob shut about it."

* * *

As crime family burials went it started off with relative decorum. The four hearses containing the coffin and the family were delayed by mourners crowding the cemetary's narrow lanes, but that was normal. Back in Stepney shops would be shut up and other businesses deserted as locals assembled here, a calculated grief on display. Hunt assumed the family hidden behind the hearses' mirrored windows were taking note of who had come to demonstrate respect.

The heavy rain had turned the cemetery lawns verdant but also slippery, and Hunt led them carefully to a good viewing position next to the last resting place of – he glanced at the gravestone – Albert Tufnel, dearly beloved husband of Ruth.

"Cheers Albert." Hunt shared around his hip flask, keeping an eye on the coffin's slow progress from hearse to grave. At least a thousand people had come out on this inclement day. They stood ten deep on the roads and another burial procession had to reverse back to one of the cemetary's other entrances.

"What do you think's happening?" Chris asked.

"That priest is making a song and dance out of the comfort the grieving mother can take in knowing her favourite son Charles is resting next to his dad, younger brother and various inbred cousins."

Never had so many scrubby bastards looked so uncomfortable in formal attire. Men with hands scrummed down into pockets of their new cheap suits, women perched on high heels and holding umbrellas. It was easy to spot the French connection – _as it were_. A tight circle of pale, lean, dark-haired young men clustered around their veiled mother. _Dorothy Lange. Long-eee._

"What's the deal with these people anyway?" Ray looked miserable as his cigarette fizzled out in the rain.

As Hunt turned around to answer, a strangled wail rang out behind him. Ripping the fascinator from her face, a young woman next to Dorothy pointed across the top of the mourners to a car that had slowly coasted to a stop behind them.

"It's only the fucking-" The woman's accusation was lost in an instant howling. Apparently the appearance of the people inside the – Hunt squinted – Mercedes were not only unwelcome but about to be taught the consequences of crossing Dorothy Lange. The Mercedes reversed at speed but the young men in the crowd fell on it in remarkably short time, hammering on the windows and bonnet. Behind them the more half-hearted, wheeze-chested mourners staggered in as back-up.

"Shouldn't we do something?" Chris slid on the grass behind him.

The Mercedes' windows were shatter-proof and the crowd gave up the attempt to smash them in, now tried to roll the car.

"No I don't think so." Hunt began picking his path back down the slushy lawn.

* * *

Three great platters of antipasti were laid out before the entire team. They had all arrived straight from work as usual, sweeping into Luigi's tonight as if they'd won some extraordinary victory, and again as usual within an hour most other diners hastily finished their meals and left.

Seven o'clock saw the arrival of the blonde lady Hunt had been using to make Signorina Drake jealous. Luigi always made a great fuss of taking her coat from her bony shoulders and treating it carefully. He vacillated between pity – she would sit there like a statue among the high spirits – and despising her for acquiescing to Hunt's pathetic ruse.

It was obvious Signore Hunt felt in his element tonight – enjoying himself thoroughly as he forced Rodney and Lewis to drink Chianti and eat the "strange muck" on the antipasti platters. Luigi knew half of them would prefer to be down at the Red Lion two streets over, tucking into roast lamb specials and pints.

_Cazzone_, Luigi thought as he placed the wine glass back on the shelf and took up another. _What happens if you get your way and she invites you back to her home? I would be relentless, merciless. Hunt, you would be a rabbit ripping its leg from the trap to get free._

"Luigi." Chris brought one of the antipasti platters up to him. "What's this?"

"Mortadella, signore." His eyes flattened a little. "Luncheon."

* * *

He'd had a good day – big operation starting up and on the quiet too. On the quiet meant no daily calls from CS Paulson wanting to know if there was progress he could report to the higher-up brass. _Now the higher-up brass are dealing directly with the Gene Genie._

But that could wait until tomorrow … he glanced at his watch and the stairs leading up to the first floor. The only problem would be if, for whatever reason (for she never said), Alex didn't come down from her flat. The thought of that possibility tonight deflated his jubilation a little – another night of strained conversation with Lorna.

Hunt caught Luigi staring at him. _Shut it_. And across the room Luigi dipped his head as he cleaned a wine glass with a tea towel. _What are you smiling for, you bastard? Do you know something? _The other fools in this place considered Luigi to be a simple-hearted Italian twat who liked nothing better than to serve them beers and wait for the "grassy-arse" encores – _I'd have thumped Skelton for that long ago_ – but Hunt knew better.

_Bloody Drake. This is a team dinner and every member of the team should be here._

"Another round, Guv?" Ray stood up.

"Eh? No." He muttered an excuse about needing to get a file from CID...

* * *

Alex whistled quietly to herself as she bounded down the steps to Luigi's. "Oh hello." She stopped herself from running into Hunt as he came barreling out the door, laughing as she fended him off with a hand. "Whoa there, where's the fire?"

"Where you been? It's late."

Oh? She checked her watch though she knew very well the time. "Gosh, I've been missing all the fun then," and she glanced through the windows to the long table where the team sat, fixated on the new television they'd obliged Luigi to install above their table. She noticed Ray had also acquired a stolen VCR from the evidence room, and they were watching a tape of last weekend's City versus West Ham match. "Sport on two televisions here now. Great. Just like the trattorias I remember from my holiday in Siena."

Alex made to step past him but he blocked her path.

"Don't come between me and a glass of wine, Guv," she joked and squeezed past him through the entrance, eyes lowered.

* * *

"Biro, you have hidden depths." Alex graciously accepted the origami swan he'd made with his unused napkin.

"Biro, you twonk." Ray half-turned away from the television. Conversation, except occasional abuse for the ref, had ceased. All eyes were raised up to their new television.

_All except your eyes, Gene_. She had been ignoring him as he sat along and across the table from her, one arm around Lorna's shoulders, another stretched over the back of the chair vacated by Rodney, who had darted away to vomit up chianti in Luigi's immaculate bathroom.

Rude, Alex thought. _Don't you look at me like that when your girlfriend's right there. _

This time last month Alex had been waiting for him to dump that cold fish and take his chances. In Brighton – she almost smiled at the thought – they'd been on the verge of flying in the face of what was left of her common sense.

_Pocky, rough, a bastard, willfully under-educated, violent. _The shift in her thinking – when had it occurred? – was a mystery to her. Hunt was still all those things but somehow those things didn't seem quite so bad. How had this ridiculous, bullish man begun to look handsome to her? She couldn't quite fathom it but she'd started to wait for his next move.

Only he hadn't made one and she knew he was taking his time and enjoying this new equilibrium between them. The memory of her hands all over him in that tacky dark Brighton club was enough to sustain him for now, it seemed.

It made her burn with embarrassment. She'd wanted him. For the second time she would have been his for the night if he hadn't stopped it. Lonely enough, drunk enough … she glanced over in his direction, thinking _be honest_. Attracted enough to pursue him.

When had it occurred? Two months ago and she'd treated him almost as a joke, keeping him at arm's length even as she responded to his bantering come-ons. _Now I'm sitting here and he's looking at me like we have this secret between us. _

"Rodney!" The berk had made them all get up to let him past just at a penalty corner.

Another night and she might have felt jealous at Lorna's hand sitting there on Hunt's, of the whispers passing between them out of ear-shot of the others.

Tonight though she felt quite another emotion. _Satisfaction_. Alex turned away from the television, putting down her glass on Biro's origami swan, and hoped her look said it all: _I know what you're up to._

Hunt had issued his invitation to the team earlier in the day – _Luigi's_, _my shout_ – and she'd waited until they all trooped off at half-past five and the night desk was settled in at reception. In Hunt's office, with the door closed, Alex had found the note from Vanderzee's secretary in the rubbish bin requesting an urgent meeting, and a stack of files that she hadn't had time to read.

_So don't you sit there and think you've got me where you want me, you tricky bastard._


	2. Chapter 2

_**II**_

"Dorothy's not stupid, you know."

Hunt slowed the Quattro as children ran onto the street in front. Beside him Annette Simcock looked warily out the passenger window as they continued their tour of Stepney. In the backseat Ray and Chris strained to catch every word - the schools had just emptied out their students for the day and the screaming was phenomenal.

"What do you suggest then?"

"I dunno." Annette folded her arms. She was 23, but in her fur-lined anorak she could pass for one of the teenagers giving the sulky eye as they drifted past. "But you can't go in there and pretend. Dorothy don't read books or anything, but she's sharp. Not that she'd need to be. People just don't walk into her neighbourhood or anywhere round here and set themselves up."

_Oh I don't know._ They had just passed plenty of black and Asian teenagers. It was a veritable melting pot as the Chief Super would say.

"You're Northern. You have a big target on you that says 'I'm a mug'. It's not really appropriate." Annette shrugged. "Let me out here. My shift at the Marseille starts soon. Marc, that's Dorothy's third one, gets his knickers in a twist if any of the girls are late."

Once she'd slammed the door Hunt drove on and turned into the wide space of Astley Square, home to Dorothy and her two youngest sons Didier and Achille. For a crime lord she'd obviously resisted the temptation to spend her ill-gotten gains on a gated compound and mansion.

On an earlier drive around the neighbourhood Annette had pointed out the modest brick house, just the same as the others in the rows enclosing the square. Curtains closed on all the windows that faced the street. "And that's where her ex-husband Noel lives. He's so nice. Still runs the chippie business over there by her cab business."

Hunt now drew to a halt directly across the road from Stepney Grab-a-Cab. Again, the shop frontage with its greyed-out windows and hint of a messy office beyond didn't exactly sing of luxury.

"What's the next move, boss?" Chris was so excited about their new investigation that he'd been taking detailed notes of Annette's gloomy nay-saying on his new pad.

"She's just lost her eldest lad," Hunt said. "We're the police and we're here to help. Starting with-" He jumped in his seat as a man leapt from nowhere and brought his fist hard down on the bonnet. A face contorted in non-sensical rage leaned in across the front window, only inches from Hunt's.

"What you fucking want?" Thick accent. Looked Arab or Turkish.

"Alright, alright." Hunt started the engine. "Settle down. I'm not from Immigration." He reversed away and watched in the rear-view mirror as the mad bald bastard retreated back into Stepney Grab-a-Cab.

* * *

"That'll keep you busy." Hunt carefully placed a stack of files on Drake's in-tray. "Granger'll give you a hand if you need it." He'd meant to leg it before her inevitable explosion, but because her head was still bent over her desk he paused. "Okay then."

Alex finally looked up, face sullen as she gave one of the files a cursory glance and then put the file down with a dismissive drop of her hand.

Again he didn't really like talking to the top of her head. "Well, someone's got to direct proceedings back here."

"Why? Because you and those two..." – she choked back the word 'losers' at the sight of Chris's questioning face – "are off working on some "top-secret" investigation that the rest of us aren't allowed to know about?" When she was angry, the finger waggling appeared again. "It's back to the A team and the B team, is it?"

Hunt tapped his knuckles down on her in-tray. "I just gave you an order."

Keeping a very deliberate eye contact she threw the file onto the floor at his feet. "Get Biro to deal with it." Hey-up, someone whistled from behind him, and glances were exchanged behind them. Alex stood up and pulled on her leather jacket. She'd made it half-way down the corridor toward reception when Hunt bailed her up.

"I don't think so, lady." He pushed the file into her arms, closing her fingers around it. "Do you know what kind of pressure I'm under to put you on cat-rescuing duties after your speech in Brighton?"

"What are you talking about? What are you saying?"

Hunt swallowed the words. _Nobody wants you around here any more, you bloody lunatic. If I can keep you out of the way, may be they won't insist you get transferred to Basingstoke. _He let go of her hands. "Don't worry about it."

"Worry about it? I'm your DI and you obviously have something pretty interesting going on. And instead of me, you've got Ray and Chris there working on it and you're all really pleased with yourselves, aren't you? What's that supposed to tell me?" She walked a few steps and then arrowed back to him. "I guess, yeah alright, I had an interesting moment there in Brighton, but don't give me **this**." She waved the file, tried a different tack. 

_Oh here we go_, he thought. Softened her voice like she was shifting down a gear.

"I've helped you with a lot of cases since I got here. And I'm a good DI. I've solved a lot of cases for you."

"I know."

"Well tell me what this is all about?!"

"Christ." Gene felt a headache coming on. "I'm just asking you to-"

"No."

He thumped the wall. "God I put up with a lot of shit from you!" Shook his head to himself as Lewis shuffled past them and disappeared into an interview room. "This conversation is over."

Hard feelings, her lip defiant as she walked away. Yes, hard feelings and the conversation was over.

* * *

Within a week of meeting illegal immigrant Alain Michaux, Dorothy Lange had left her husband Noel and the chippie shop they ran together, to move into Alain's bedsitter across the street in Astley Square. She'd come from a large old East End family, one of seven children, and at the age of thirty-four she'd remained childless. But within a year she'd given birth to her first son Evariste and then five more sons nearly every year after.

According to the files Adrien Vanderzee has assembled, Dorothy and Alain had also given birth to a network of illegal businesses. Hunt counted them: financing kidnappings, stand-overs and drug deals, robberies and abductions. When Alain had died three years ago of a heart attack outside his mistress's house it seemed the family's criminal inclinations only intensified.

The problem was, as Hunt looked through the files, the family had so many enemies. As her sons grew to manhood (except for Roger, dead from leukemia at 14), they looked to prove themselves, brutalising ever expanding areas around the radius of their base in Stepney.

_Too many sons._

Why had someone killed Charles Michaux, the second son? He'd been found not guilty of assault in the previous year so it could have been a revenge job.

Or a strike at Dorothy? It was well-known that he was the favourite son.

Hunt looked at the photo stapled to the most recent file. Like all of the sons, a bluish pale face and soulful black eyes. Charles had been cultivating a beard and mustache to harden up his soft features.

Dropping the file onto the floor of the Quattro, Hunt got out and walked with Ray to the entrance of Stepney Grab-a-Cab. The sign on the door said 'closed' although it was only seven in the evening. They knocked and entered.

"Hello again." Hunt nodded at the bald mad man who'd left a mark on the Quattro yesterday. Another man sat behind the high counter in the small front room, the telephone receiver cradled in his shoulder. "I would like a word with Dorothy Lange please," he said, holding up his badge.

"Not here." The bald man wasn't a son; his accent was nearly incomprehensible or the wince on Carling's face as he listened told him it was. "You go sit outside and spy again from your car."

Hunt held Ray back as he glanced behind the man on the phone through to the back office, which was lit. The shape of a person was visible through the smoked glass doors. "I can wait inside until Dorothy arrives. Or go to her home. Across the street, isn't it?"

The bald man knocked over a seat in his haste to shoulder-charge them back through the entrance.

"Tut-ku! That's enough!"

Eyebrows raised, Hunt stepped past the man and left his back to Ray. "Wait outside." He pushed open the door to the back room.

"He should be on a leash."

The woman sitting at a table with a cup of tea in front of her held up a smoke to the side of her face. It was Dorothy, but the broiler chicken face from the mug-shot had gone. _Now I see what she's been spending her dirty money on: a hell of a lot of cosmetic surgery._

"Tutku's paid to watch out for me," she said. "Among other things." She was still blonde, still a little heavy around the jowls, he thought. The kind who turned very red when she'd had a few drinks. But he had to give her some credit – she'd pulled herself back from the brink of six births' oblivion. Her eyebrows, still thin, were a little more shaped, her face quite smooth, and though plump she had what he'd call _a commanding bosom. _Still had that short perm though.

"I'm from the Metropolitan Police, Fenchurch East. I was very sorry to hear about your son Charles. We're investigating his death and that of..." He couldn't remember the teenage girl's name and looked to Dorothy. She looked back. She didn't know either. "I know it's only been a few days, but I'd like to talk with you about anyone who might have wanted to harm Charles."

Dorothy turned her attention to the tarot cards she'd laid out on the table a moment before. "I've been doing this for years. My husband Alain took me to a fortune-teller in Marseille on our honeymoon. She told me I'd have many sons and I didn't believe her at the time. I thought I was barren." She took a long drag, a blonde curl flopped over her eye. "I don't know you, and I don't know where Fenchurch East is. I'm not sure why you're coming around here."

"Whether or not you know me," and he held out his badge, "I have a duty to investigate every murder I'm assigned to. Starting with the people in that Mercedes who showed up at your son's burial."

"Yeah," she reflected. "That was rude of them." Then she gave a short, snortish laugh. "You're not from round here, are you? If you can come up with a list of arse-holes that's shorter than a page I'll have a little chat with you." She nodded through the open door. "That poodle of yours is about to be neutered. Tut-ku, it's fine. Let the policemen back out the door."

* * *

"You know what I can't stand?" Alex's arms ached from turning the heavy bloody steering wheels. _Power-steering can not come soon enough_, she thought as she pulled into a park outside the house of an elderly lady who'd had her shopping bags snatched. "It's the looks on Ray and Chris's faces when they come in because they're on the 'A Team'. Like they're the big shots."

"I know, ma'am. Chris is pretty cock-a-hoop about it." Shaz got out and looked at her across the hood. "I've asked him about what it's all about and he just smiles. Made me **really **mad the other night."

"Like they think that it's the universe restored to its rightful condition. Them working with DCI Hunt … oooh … and us..." She looked up at the old lady's flat. She was watching anxiously from her window.

"I know. It's pretty rough that those rumours have been going around about you … you know about what happened in Brighton." Shaz coloured as Alex coloured. "Sorry, ma'am. Viv told me that some of the brass upstairs have been trying to get DCI Hunt to transfer you out."

"Do you think it's possible?"

"Well I'm sorry, but Chris and Ray are kind of not worried if you go." Shaz nudged her arm affectionately as Alex stepped onto the footpath. "Sorry. They just think the Guv's let you run riot and now it's time for them to get serious."

Stolen shopping trolleys, shop-lifters. Being sent to Basingstoke. Alex shook her head. _I am meant to be here. If I get sent away, what would happen to me?_ She thought of her conversations with Sam Tyler.

_I'm meant to be here until I find a way back to you, Molly.  
_

* * *

"No one's saying much about it at the club," Annette said as she and Hunt walked out of CID at half-past nine. "Charles didn't come to the club much. It's Evariste and Marc's thing so he left them alone." She was chewing gum thoughtfully. "I've been working at the bar at the club for three months and trying to get close to Evariste. He seems really sweet. I've never seen him turn nasty like Marc does."

"So you haven't heard any rumours from them or the people working in the club about who killed Charles?" Hunt asked.

"Like I say, I've been trying to get close to Evariste, but I'm not actually sure that he's tied up with any crime business at all. I've never heard talk about any of the stuff the rest of the family's into. He just seems to like to sit at the bar or in his office and watch what's happening around him."

"Is he a bit simple?" Chris asked, notepad out, pen ready.

Annette winced. "No. He's just nice."

"Not very helpful to us," Hunt commented. "Can you … you know … have a tilt at the other brother?"

"Marc?" She was shivering. Standing on the winter street in a jean mini-skirt and lacy leggings. "He's got a procession of girlfriends coming through the club. And sooner or later they all end up with a black eye. So no, I don't fancy my chances."

* * *

To pass the time until Gene Hunt arrived Lorna was perched on a bar stool and watching Olivia Newton-John and Cliff Richard serenading each other on the television.

_Suddenly the wheels are in motion / And I… I'm ready to sail any ocean  
Suddenly I don't need the answers / Cos I …I'm ready to take all my chances with you_

"Ooh, nice red sequins." Alex nodded up at Olivia Newton-John's dress as she squeezed between two chairs at the bar. "Luigi, can I get a bottle to take upstairs please?" Lorna hadn't turned her eyes from the television or answered. "I hope Cliff and Olivia will end up marrying. Do you think John Travolta will mind?"

Hmm … she noted Lorna's short feathery-cut hair, the grey sweat-shirt material dress, the red plaited head-band. Okay, so making fun of Olivia Newton-John wasn't a conversation starter either. "I have all her albums," she added quietly.

Lorna finally looked at her. "Are you really going to drink that upstairs? Or are you going to sit at the bar and stare at Gene all night again?"

Luigi didn't know where to look as he handed the wine bottle over.

"Umm …" Neither did Alex. "No."

"Good." She would have turned her attention back to Cliff and Olivia except Hunt came through the door with some new woman in a ridiculous denim mini-skirt. _Like a big strutting rooster,_ Alex thought as Hunt took in her and Lorna both seated at the bar.

_Olivia Newton-John and some gum-chewing teenager. I cannot compete with that._ Alex took her bottle of wine, slowing down as she passed him on the way to her stairs. "Good luck, Gene."


	3. Chapter 3

_**III**_

Nobody he knew had useful contacts in the Stepney underworld. Hell, he'd never heard of Dorothy Lange, but it became clear from a couple of days' enquiry that she was known around and about for more than just her latent reproductive powers.

No time to find new snouts. They required cultivation – a careful balance of entrapping and cajoling, threats and favours.

"Raymondo, Christopher, track down the owner of that Mercedes so we can determine whether they are still in fact breathing." Vanderzee was right about how quickly wars between these families could start up. It was a pattern that repeated, whether in Manchester, the East End or Marseille. Scum had their boundaries, their alliances, their understandings. And they watched each other jealously – kept an uneasy peace until someone stepped out of line.

A challenge like this made him edgy, like there was no way to relax. _No, it's fine._ He had options – he'd find out who killed Charles Michaux. Annette was working her stocky, snub-nosed charms on the eldest brother at the Club Marseille. And he … well he wasn't going to sit in his office with DI Drake ignoring him and the rest of the twonks pretending to be busy.

_I'm just doing my job. Charles Michaux didn't accidentally catch five bullets so naturally I should be making enquiries. _

Of course Dorothy was smart enough to wonder why a strange policeman from the Met CID was looking into her son's death. He assumed she was familiar with the police in her area. There were a few he himself knew by their dodgy reputations.

About now was the time Annette began her shift at the Club Marseille. Hunt drove over to Connell Street, a quiet out-of-the-way area of panel-beaters, garages and the odd warehouse. The Club Marseille itself had been a warehouse until last year when two of Dorothy's sons had bought the lease out. It looked like nothing much from the front – a lackluster marquee and green neon sign leading up some stairs to an enormous club floor.

No class. Some people spent money and some people did everything on the cheap. Inside the Marseille wasn't exactly grimy, but the empty floor had the atmosphere of a roller-stake rink. Cold, festooned with dodgy wiring and harsh neon lighting. A long bar along the back wall stacked with cheap alcohol. He looked up at a mezzanine overlooking the entire venue – no doubt the office and viewing room for the owners, it had only two small windows for spying on the patrons.

* * *

"What kind of accent is that?"

"What kind of name is Michaux?" Hunt replied without a pause, looking around the office. "It's a Northern accent. And where I come from, people like you change your names to Michaels."

Marc Michaux was definitely what he'd immediately class as a right little bastard. He'd answered no questions about his brother, flitted about the room and now started to pick up the phone. His brother stopped him gently. "Sorry, inspector."

_No I'm sorry. The man looks like fucking death_, Hunt thought. Evariste. Evariste. Again, what kind of name ... but to hell with the name, he'd never seen a paler, runtier little Frenchman in his life.

"My colleague at CID is talking to the people in that Mercedes that showed up at your brother's funeral. Bit of a cheek, isn't it?" Hunt's knowledge about the Bacchic scenes at the cemetery seemed to surprise neither of them.

"It was rude, yes. Those men shouldn't have been at my brothers' funeral. They knew that." Evariste was puzzling him. Hunt had met many a smarmy git, and many smarmy gits had ways with coppers. Evasive politeness. But the manners, the gentleness seemed real with this one. Maybe Annette had been right – Hunt had passed her at the bar as she cleaned glasses and avoided eye contact – maybe he was just a nice man.

"Your mum must be devastated. Spoiling the burial like that."

"My mum don't need your help or sympathy." Marc reached back to tie his long dark hair into a pony tail.

"You know, you're making me feel very unwelcome." To provoke the little prick he strolled around the small stuffy room, opening the drawer of a filing cabinet, taking a peek out those two windows to the dance floor below.

Hunt had found out all about Marc Michaux. Arrested seven times since his sixteenth birthday. At twenty, he'd spent his birthday evening in a police cell, knocked out cold by a copper's punch to the forehead. Tall and very slim, he never seemed to stop moving around the room.

"I've never had the coppers trying to help my family before." His eyes were very small, but again like all the other brothers soft and rather sweet. Like the dead brother he'd grown a mustache to dispatch that hint of vulnerability.

"Well I hope I can change your mind about the Police." Hunt went to the door. "We're here to help, you know." He paused on the stairs in case they started talking. The door leading to the club floor at the bottom of the stairs was open. Dorothy Lange stood down by the bar, waiting for him.

* * *

"Found my son's murderer?" Dorothy had a teasing way about her, even if she was talking about a man on a Kawasaki who had taken less than five seconds to end her son's life.

Hunt lit her cigarette for her. Menthols, Christ. "You know what? I think you're right about the long list of suspects. I'm struggling. Have to admit."

She wore more make-up than she had at their first meeting – he'd met few women her age so confident and uninterested in pleasing. She let the conversation hang for a full, uncomfortable minute. Annette stood not too far away, stacking packets of crisps. Had she ripped a few inches off her mini-skirt since the last time he saw her?

"You're a bit old for a club like this, aren't you?" she said to him.

"Likewise." He noticed Dorothy liked a bit of stick. She liked to give it and she didn't mind it back. _She would eat me alive. _He wished he'd brought Ray along. _Better you than me, Raymondo. _

"I don't stay long." No doubt she was here to whisk away the takings before her sons spent it. Maybe that's why the club had the touch of mildew about it. As if she read his thoughts she added, "You should come back here at night. Don't look like much, but it's packed every night."

"I may do that."

She glanced at Annette. "Don't tell Tutku." She passed Hunt on her way to the stairs up to the office. Her arm brushed his. "He's very jealous."

* * *

"I heard you were up here." Hunt flopped down beside her on the grey leather couch, pulling them both into the centre. "Christ!" He scooted up to perch on the arm. "Your big bum did that."

They both looked at Vanderzee's secretary, who was watering some roses.

"Lovely," he commented. "Present from an admirer?"

The secretary turned and frowned at him the way young pretty girls did – _perve_. They'd disturbed her routine so she went off to the kitchen, leaving them in the narrow annex beside her desk and the Assistant Commissioner's office.

Hunt immediately turned on her. "Viv said you'd been talking about coming up here to have it out with the AC. Has he had the full-tilt "you are all constructs" treatment yet?"

"No." Alex looked at her watch: 5.30 pm. "He's due back from a meeting soon. And I'm just going to ask him what's going on. I have a right to know why you're acting weird. So is Paulson for that matter. Can't be just because I gave a bad speech in Brighton." She lifted her hand to her mouth. Just the name - Brighton - seemed to spook her.

"Great." Hunt folded his arms. "Today has been pretty dull so far. I knew I could rely on you to liven it up."

"I'm in complete control of my faculties today. Sorry."

"Sure. But he's already made up his mind about you."

Alex looked at him for a few seconds, pensive. "I saw you and him, you know? In Brighton. You left me at the lifts at the hotel and you went and had a chat with him."

"What? You think I grassed you up?" He waited. "He was thinking of giving you a nice big shiny medal for services to policing and then I came along and told him some lies?"

"What did you say then?" She turned on him. The look in her eyes and he immediately knew she'd been bottling this up for days. "Let me guess. He's got some job he needs done and he can't get any of the law-abiding police to do it, so he's called in you and perm squad."

_Oh here we go. _Hunt got up to leave. "I know I'm wasting my time, but I came up here to just ask you to get back to your desk and do your ruddy job. Just do it quietly until he forgets about Brighton and things can get back to normal."

"I can't do that." She went to the door and surprised Vanderzee, who held the door courteously for her. She made to say something but he put up his hand with a "sorry, I have an urgent phone call to take" and entered his office. Through the shades on his internal windows he raised an eyebrow at Hunt.

* * *

_...and things can get back to normal._ That's what Hunt had said.

_What's normal? Normal is me getting up at 6.15 in the morning and making Molly toast. Normal is me eating her crusts for my breakfast and asking when her dad's going to be back in town to have her for the weekend so I can work late at the office. Normal is me telling myself I'll spend more time with her tomorrow and promising the same the next day._

That was the thing, she thought as she left Vanderzee's office and walked down the corridor. _I can hardly remember what it's like, being her parent. _

"You **can** see reason." Hunt caught up with her at the lifts. She hadn't pressed the button down and looked at him distractedly.

What was her routine now? For months she'd been in this state of … she looked at Hunt … like him. Like a teenager again. Wearing a dead girl's clothes, eating downstairs at Luigi's, drinking herself into a dead sleep most nights.

_I'm going to just drift on like this, aren't I? Like you. _The expression on her face was asking him a question, but she hadn't articulated it.

* * *

They got into the lift together, and two uniformed policemen joined them. Hunt noticed them both eye up Drake as she looked straight ahead into the leather-embossed doors. It was funny. He'd worked with her for months, and even though she was so beautiful you actually got used to it. Until someone else took the slightest interest … and the burn on his face reminded him why he'd come up to get her out of Vanderzee's office.

The policemen got out. She walked off after them, oblivious to the fact that both had stopped to tie shoelaces and stare up at her arse.

"You know, it's hard to feel sorry for you." Hunt kept pace with her down the front steps and onto the street. "You've been getting away with it since you got here." Unlike most people she looked at him when he spoke, and she never broke her gaze off. "Can't say I blame you. If I was a bird and I looked like you I'd be doing the same. Except I wouldn't be hanging around police stations with the likes of me." Sensing he was entertaining her, he continued. "I'd be in bloody Greece, wearing a string bikini, having my… well you know."

Now Alex laughed. "No. Please go on."

"But you're here, picking a fight with the one bloke, the **one** bloke in the world who's not having it." He reached out a tentative finger and prodded her shoulder. "It's the knitwear."

"Excuse me?"

"His wife modelled for knitwear catalogues. You can't compete with that." Now she started walking again and he kept pace, hands in pockets. "You're just lucky he didn't take up my suggestion for getting you out of Fenchurch East."

"Oh, and what is that?"

Gene's eyes dipped to her blue top sliding off her shoulder, and the bra strap threatening to do the same. "A dress code."

"Are you trying to charm me, Gene?"

He glanced at his watch. "I'm saying let's go have a quiet drink and call it a truce."

"And you'll tell me what you've got going on with Vanderzee? And you'll stop keeping things from me?"

_No, _he thought silently_. This is for all our sakes._

"Then no."

* * *

"Guv, message from DS Carling for you." Viv opened the door, let the harsh light of the checkerboard ceiling into the DCI's office. "Ray says that he's been following the people in the Mercedes?"

Hunt nodded yes that he knew what that meant.

"The Mercedes is in Connell Street. Looks like some trouble at the club you visited this afternoon."

"Alright then." Hunt gulped down the glass of scotch and walked briskly out through the office.

"Do you know what that's all about?" Viv asked her as Alex slowly got up from her desk, dropping the folder containing her statement from the owner of a missing Alsatian in Bethnal Green.

"Big boy's games, Viv." She drew her jacket around her shoulders and walked slowly down the corridor.


	4. Chapter 4

**The lyrics to Poison Arrow by ABC do not belong to me**

_**IV**_

"Fucking watch it!" Ray shook the mixture of blood and saliva off his hand, disgusted. "Here, have some back." He wiped it on the man's jacket as a plod hauled him off to the wagons. A car-load of lads had turned into a pitched battle on Connell Street.

"Bottle!" The twenty policemen scattered to the side of the Molotov cocktail's trajectory. Hunt wiped his nose at the acrid smell of the burning tires. _Us out in the wide open. Them hiding behind the pillars of the overbridge. _

Behind their backs, a huge crowd had formed outside the entrance to Club Marseille. Eight o'clock and so dark already that the next flaming bottle lobbed at them was like a comet.

Smashed-out street lights. Screaming girl running to them with blood in her hair.

"Bloody Nora." Hunt watched the girl collapse onto the footpath before she was taken into arms of an ambulance officer. "I guess this is retaliation for that stoush at the cemetery the other day."

"I can't bloody tell what's going on." Ray had that cornered look. The police had turned up quickly as dozens of calls came in from around Stepney. Fires started, young men on the street. An oil drum packed with god-knows-what had just been set rolling along the asphalt towards them.

Hunt had been out there in Brixton for the riots earlier in the year. And this could turn nasty too. Half the crowd were looking on from the club at the entertainment, and half had formed some kind of Palestinian bloody resistance at the end of Connell Street with their stones and beer bottles.

"Is that the bugger?" He noted the Mercedes parked down there towards the end.

"Yeah. He let two or three young twerps out of the car and just been sat there watching it all happen." Ray's eyes were watering with the smoke. "One minute they were just cruising with me following them, and the next these bastards were streaming out of the bloody sewers at us."

"Right." Hunt called all the police to him, an act that took five minutes because no one could hear even his bellow above the screaming women and threats of anarchy.

A command given. The police lifted their riot shields, formed a line, and walked slowly down Connell Street, stepping over bloodied clothes, many bottles and a burning tire. Behind them Hunt strolled with Ray and Chris towards the retreating pack. Some of them would peel off into the night. And some of them were too drunk to go anywhere. And those ones would get a right kicking when Ray got hold of them.

* * *

Within an hour the floor at Club Marseille shook with people brought out into the night by the tense glamour of a near riot. The police had swarmed over the street, onlookers jeering them as scores of bloodied young men were hauled into the wagons.

Most disappeared into early morning, off to trouble somewhere else. The queues at the club entrance snaked around the corner of Connell Street into the alleys. Chris and Ray stayed by Hunt, singling out some of the pricks who had tried to bottle them.

"I've had enough of this," Chris groaned. "Look at my jeans." They were spotted with the blood of a berk who'd shoulder-charged the Guv and been elbowed in the cheek for his trouble.

"Wouldn't want to be Viv tonight," Hunt said. "It's going to be like the cattleyards at CID … anyway, drink?"

"Of course." They paused by the Mercedes and its owner, a middle-aged bloke in a grey suit, who was giving his name to police.

"We'll catch up with you later." Hunt noted the name the policeman had written down. Raymond Gage.

Pushing their way through the crowds they passed through the entrance into the heat and smoke of Club Marseille. After them the orderly queues disintegrated and cagey teenagers began pushing to get in the doors. The bouncers started throwing their own punches.

_Not the kind I want to hang out with._ Hunt looked around in the gloom. Hair gel, tight jeans, pimples and tight white t shirts. Christ. Panel-beaters, criminals, plumbing apprentices, unemployed trouble-making bastards. Red faces and perspiration under the club lights. Hard fuckers with their leather jackets on in this heat, dragging around their sweaty girl friends.

Some of the birds were far more glamorous of course, the kind who worked as secretaries and then came to places like this to meet criminals. He had to push again through the wall of punters to get to the bar itself.

"How's it going?"

Annette shrugged, struggling to lip-read. "It's bleeding ugly in here tonight. Some ape just thumped his girlfriend."

"Jesus. Where? I can throw them in the wagon with the rest of the scum."

"Don't worry. Taken care of." She glanced towards the stool at the end of the bar where Evariste Michaux usually sat, enjoying his full club. "He's a real sweet-heart that one."

"Any results there?" In this noise it was no time for a conversation and he guessed that Annette was too proud to admit her first undercover Mata Hari performance was not going well. Month after month, night after night, serving Evariste Michaux drinks and he was as polite and uncommunicative as ever. Not in so many words, but she'd tanked it.

She poured Hunt a drink and made sure he handed over the money. He knew Marc Michaux would be watching from his keep-like square windows up on the mezzanine.

* * *

Dorothy hadn't been wrong. It was still a dump, but the smoke machine had pushed out a fog onto the club floor and people were cheek to jowl out there. It had that feeling … a place in time going off. No one wishing they were somewhere else; the threat of danger was enough to keep them around. Like this was the centre of the world.

Evariste had sat back down at the bar. Like Humphrey Bogart with a fucking heart condition.

Hunt circled through the crowd. It must have been his sixth sense, because he'd thought about heading back to his car to visit Raymond Gage in the cells. The time was a quarter to one in the morning. But somehow he stayed there, loosening his tie. And after a quarter of an hour he knew why.

She walked through the door. No jacket tonight, just the jeans and a sleeveless red top. Ignoring the 'oh no way' looks Chris and Ray were throwing from the floor. A song ended. People slowed to a stand-still. Another started up and strobe lights started to spin faster.

_Who broke my heart? You did, you did  
Bow to the target, / Blame cupid, cupid  
You think you're smart / Stupid, stupid._

Alex passed him by cooly. He'd seen the look on her face only a few times. 'What are you going to do about it, Hunt?'

_Shoot that poison arrow to my heart  
Shoot that poison arrow_

Hunt knew he should have stopped her, but he just had to stand back for a second and admire the sheer fucking bravado. _Bolls, you must have followed us out tonight, watched us battle those thugs, watched me kick that little prick with the switch-blade._

_Right on the target / But wide of the mark  
What I thought was fire / Was only the spark  
The sweetest melody / Is an unheard refrain  
So lower your sights, / Yeah but raise your aim  
Raise your aim _

Annette might as well hang up her mini-skirt and clock off - he knew without turning around that Evariste Michaux would be falling over himself to buy Alex a drink.

* * *

He wanted to drag her into a quiet corner and shout at her. _Not well played. _Even from a distance that self-satisfied smile on her face made him want to thump someone. Evariste had left her side, but the look on her face as she glanced over his way with that tilt of her head told him she knew why.

Hunt was waiting for his chance but she never left the bar, and Christ there were so many watchers in this place. He headed to the opposite end of the long bar where it was darker and less visible to the windows on the mezzanine office. Annette leaned over to him.

"You cannot be serious," she hissed.

"This ain't my doing."

"Make her fucking leave."

He raised his eyebrows. _Come on, love. She just pulled off something you couldn't manage in six months of trying. _"Just give her a message from me next time that French bell-end buys her a drink. She'd better meet me in that stairwell in five minutes or she's fired."

He watched Annette deliver the message and Alex Drake stare cooly down the bar at him, her head nodding to the club beat.

* * *

Marc Michaux skipped quickly through the door at the top of the stairwell and found Hunt there waiting. In the primary red and blue club lights he was prettier than most of the birds out there on the floor. "My mother's upstairs. She wants a word."

"Hmm …" He watched Marc walk out onto the floor and then stop near his brother. He must have been keeping an eye on Evariste and Drake through his tiny windows. There was something about his body language. Even from the back. Hunt frowned and walked up the stairs.

* * *

"Let's get out of here." Hunt grabbed Ray's arm and hauled away from a drunken woman in sweaty gold lame. The urgency in his voice made Ray drop his hands from the woman's arse and follow quickly.

"You alright, Guv?"

Hunt took the cigarette from Ray's mouth. "She locked the door, Raymondo. She wasn't going to let me out til I shagged her." It took him several goes with the lighter. "This is a fucking rough night."

Dorothy had sent Tutku out of the room directly and after he'd sworn and slammed the door shut she'd leant against it.

"You are a knight in shining armour," she'd said to Hunt. She'd been wearing a mauve V neck and high heels. Visible bra line, he'd noted. Dirty. "Arresting all those little bastards out there causing trouble. You keep doing me good."

It had been very noisy but he had clearly heard the door lock behind her back.

Gene now frowned at Raymondo. "Seeing us roughing up all them blokes sent her into a frenzy."

Chris started to laugh but the look on Hunt's face warned him into silence.

"Where's that crazy Turkish bastard?" And then he remembered and stopped in his tracks. "And where the bloody hell is Drake?"

* * *

The bathroom had been full of chattering girls when she entered, but unlocking the toilet door it was silent. And so much cooler than out there on the dance floor.

Alex turned on the taps and looked up into the mirrors at her own large dark eyes under the harsh tube lights. Behind her, Evariste's brother leaned against the cubicle divider next to the one she'd left. His pose told her that he'd been there a while.

"He's very lucky."

She'd just been able to stifle a cry. What was his name? She'd just been introduced to him there out on the floor by Evariste. She couldn't remember his name and it had been so loud anyway. He came behind her very quickly.

But he just looked at her reflection in the mirror, and as her heart leapt in her chest she looked at his reflection. With his long black hair, and rather nice goatee, he looked like a musketeer.

"I wish I'd seen you first," he said, full of admiration as he looked from her reflection to her.


	5. Chapter 5

**_V_**

"Why does he wear an eye-patch? Is his eye missing?" Shaz chewed on a finger nail, only paying attention to the television now and then. No one in the office moved to answer Drake's phone.

Suppressing a seed of annoyance at her interruption, Chris patiently explained. "He doesn't actually need it – he just likes to wear it as part of his superhero outfit."

"Is that a walrus?"

"No, it's a chinchilla."

"And that other one, DangerMouse's friend, that's a guinea pig?"

"No … Penfold is a …" Chris looked at Ray. "What's the word?"

"Hamster."

"I can't believe you record these every day, Biro."

"Yeah, now we know why he spends all them hours alone in the evidence room." Chris saw Alex Drake approaching the office doors through the internal windows and nudged Ray. "Hey up. It's going to get ugly in here in about ten seconds."

"Oh god." Ray switched the television off in anticipation. "He's been waiting for this all morning."

* * *

"Everybody except **you**, **you **and **you **get out!" Hunt paced between the desks as she hung her jacket carefully on the coat rack and straightened her top. Alex knew she'd best suppress the sense of renewed energy and, _yes_ triumph, she'd been feeling since she'd woken this morning. The events of only hours before had come right back to her. Evariste Michaux, like Prince Charming, making her promise to have dinner with him. Stopping her for one more dance as she attempted to leave Club Marseille at two am. _Tell me any song and I'll go upstairs and put it over the sound-system._

Of course, under the furious eyes of the team she'd put him off and walked off into Connell Street and her car before Hunt caught up. At home she'd locked the front door and taken the phone off the hook. She'd been so tired – the recriminations and eye-bulging could wait. _Until now I guess_.

"Right," – clapping his hands together – "let's recap on a wonderful night. On the plus side we have a top suspect down in the cells to interview over the death of Charles Michaux. On the not so very wonderful side, I am apparently now going out with a vicious mob granny and **you **have become a runty Frenchman's gang moll." Clapping his hand on her arm Gene Hunt escorted her into his office, Ray and Chris following sheepishly.

"Feast your eyes." The white-board with its stunted family tree. "You wanted to be dealt into this mess. Well, take a good look. Your new boyfriend is part of this family and every one of them has a big target on their backs."

She examined Evariste's face, then the photos of his brothers. "And you think you have the killer of this one downstairs?" Alex had read Vanderzee's intelligence files a couple of nights ago. Hunt gave her a look to let her understand that he knew now that she'd been rifling through his office, but they didn't waste time on that. "Sounds like we can make a case and maybe calm this whole situation down."

"We," he repeated levelly. "The problem, Bolls, is I've seen how these operations go down before. Seen them in Manchester. Enough deaths in a family and it creates a big opportunity for someone else and other arseholes step up, cos they can grab summat off the weakened family. The whole community's caught in the cross-fire." He pointed to the picture of the teenage girl gunned down with Charles Michaux. "Like her. I can't figure this thing out, and now you've just gone in as usual and stomped right in there in your leather boots."

Alex sniffed. "But it's not as if I just ruined some intricate operation you'd been planning for months." She glanced out into the office to where Annette, the gum-chewing teenager from the previous night, was talking to Shaz and seemingly berating her. "From what I can see, all those months of undercover bar-tending have amounted to precisely nothing."

"And you think that you'll get that bloke to fess up by shaking your magnificent tits in his face," – he gave Carling and Skelton a 'yeah I said it' acknowledgement.

"I know more about surveillance operations than anyone here, you included."

"Get out." He motioned behind him to Ray and Chris and would have kicked them to get out the door if they hadn't hustled quite so fast. The walls reverberated with the slammed door. "Right now, I am fully prepared to agree with our Assistant Commissioner and get you transferred to the Cotswolds to spend the rest of your life investigating missing anoraks."

"Oh come on," she pleaded. "You know I'm your best option right now. I could have a date with Evariste any time I want it. Give me a chance-"

"This is not some … they look pretty, but they're murdering little bastards. You won't be able to hold him off. He's going to want to-"

"Gene, he's sick. I think he'd be happy to hold my hand."

"I'm not talking about him." He banged the picture of Marc Michaux on the whiteboard, and she couldn't hide the pensive look on her face.

Did Hunt have a point? Alex sat down in front of his desk. It **was** one of her problems – recklessness. Even worse now because Molly wasn't there to hold her back. _Recklessness got me here. I should have kept driving Molly to school that day and let Arthur Layton get shot by armed response. But what am I supposed to do now I'm here? _

Charging on was the only way forward.

"I can handle him," she said. Hunt was so close that she could see the slight scars around his mouth, and he the bump on her nose. "And anyway," she whispered to stop herself fixating on his mouth and his sharp face. "What about you and Dorothy Lange? Shaz told me she's taken a fancy to you. You should be worried for yourself." She needed to leave, but couldn't help herself – even though he was so cross, she reached out to straighten his crooked tie, hands lingering softly near his neck. "I am so impressed. You've got what … three women on the go now? I'm going to have to watch myself with you. You're a real heart-breaker."

Annette's hand was on the door-knob and she was watching them both, but he still said nothing as if daring her to say more. To break the spell she slapped his cheek lightly. "Luckily for me, you look like you came off a sweaty whisky bender. Better go get yourself some sleep so you're fresh for the next time Dorothy locks the door on you."

Annette Simcock was not happy as she opened the door_.  
_

* * *

Her phone had been ringing on and off the entire morning. It rang again and finally Rodney went to answer it, but Alex swooped across the office to snatch the receiver from his hand before he could say a word.

"Looks like I've got a date," she announced to Hunt, who had followed Annette out. "You two," she beckoned to Chris and Ray, unbuttoning her blouse. "You said you wanted to do some real surveillance work. So here's your chance. Who wants to wire me up?"

* * *

Raymond Gage was used to spending nights in his mistress's bed, not on the rippling plastic mattress of a police cell. He'd begun shaving his head as his luxurious black hair receded towards the middle of his head. A man of power did not wait in trepidation for his hair to gradually fall out.

A night in the cells and the stubble had started to grow back. Well he was a virile man. And impatient for an interview. Impatient with his lawyer too, who had attempted to evade answering any of the grumpy policeman's questions. Raymond Gage wasn't about to be silenced though. He'd had a night to think and it made sense to talk.

"This bloke." The policeman with the perm put down a photo of the body of Charles Michaux. "And this teenage girl." Her photo, Raymond Gage looked at it. He had twin daughters her age. "She was killed too because she was going out to visit a friend."

All the coppers in the room were angry, professionally angry, but the tall one who had been standing up against the interview room's back wall? He was tightly wound, Gage could tell. Gage had men like that on his payroll. Tensions drove them through every minute of their lives, and although they could seem perfectly carefree drinking a cup of tea in their kitchens, they were only ever a second away from tripping on some internal switch and unleashing mayhem. That's why they were on his payroll.

_This man would be a great enforcer_, he thought.

"I know about it." Gage stopped his lawyer from interrupting. "I'm not incriminating myself. Everyone knew about his murder as soon as it went down. But I didn't order it. Why would I?"

"Because you saw an opportunity." The policeman stepped away from the wall and lit a smoke. "You saw a way to weaken the Michaux family because they've been getting too big for their berets. You think that you ought to be the one keeping the community living in fear." He nodded to the photo of the teenage girl. "Congratulations. I doubt any nice family in Stepney lets their kids out to play in the streets now. And then you ordered your little army of thugs to get over to finish Lange and her sons off in their club last night."

"I have kids myself!" Raymond still couldn't really look at the agonised face and crumpled body of that teenage girl. "You've got it all wrong."

"We've got a fucking enormous file on you, Mr Gage." The man stepped around the desk to get closer. "I read it and I know there's nothing you're not capable of."

"I didn't order that hit, I didn't kill that girl." He pushed off his brief's pleading arm. "I went over to Connell Street yesterday because Dorothy Lange invited me."

"Why?"

"She said it was to clear the air. But I'm not a stupid man and I made sure I had some men around about. And as I suspected, she or her sons had organised a welcome party." He had never admitted a single thing before to the police in his entire life. But now...he had the policeman's full, unblinking attention. "Her family's out of control. Time was when she and that prick French husband of hers used to run some business around Stepney and I didn't like it, but I didn't want to start fucking murdering people over it. But since he died she and her sons have just been causing mayhem." Nervous, Gage tapped the table with his signet ring. "I think you lot like to pretend that families like mine have some sort of code we all live by. That is romantic horse-shit, but I'll tell you something. There are things we do and don't do just because we live in the community ourselves."

* * *

_Too many sons._ Hunt repeated the thought over in his head as he crossed the street outside CID to the Quattro. He had a queasy feeling. You never knew you were being watched until it was too late. You'd already given something away, betrayed yourself. And someone would be watching.

Someone **was **watching. An Audi pulled up just in front of his own on the empty street and Vanderzee opened the driver's door slightly so that Hunt had to bend in to see him and hear him. Word had got back to him of course.

"I heard you let Raymond Gage go."

"We didn't have evidence to hold him, sir." Hunt had these kinds of conversations at least once a week, but usually with that prat CS Paulson. _Sorry, sir – working on it, sir – will try harder, sir._

"So you've achieved nothing." Vanderzee kept his hands on the steering wheel. It was a spotless all-leather cream interior and smelled like fake pine fragrance. "You've got a reputation for moving quickly. But I gave you all that months' worth of intelligence and then you had a chat with Raymond Gage and let him go."

"You think Gage is guilty here?"

Vanderzee was out of uniform, wearing shorts and a jersey, with squash racquets in the back seat. The fact that he looked barely forty had never irritated Hunt until now. He was one of them blokes – wanted the impossible. Restricted the options and still wanted it.

"I'm just trying to do this properly, sir."

Vanderzee stared ahead, a look of pain on his face. He never got angry, but _Christ_, _he looks like he could happily see me dead right now_. "First, Hunt. Don't tell me about how you're following the process. That's what all the incompetent idiots in this force do. Tell me about the results."

Second? Hunt knew what second was about.


	6. Chapter 6

_**VI**_

_So this is what I missed out on when I was tucked up in my bed, reading under the covers with the torchlight on? _

Somewhere out there in London her eight-year-old self would have rushed back to Evan's lovely warm home before the cold night swept in, nose dripping to her dinner and television, groaning at her nine o'clock bed-time.

Alex had never known this was happening out there in the winter city – a casino hidden behind a laundry on a quiet docklands dead-end street. Restaurants crammed with tarts, wide boys, Sloaney types, businessmen. No nine to fivers among them. Nobody clocking off a boring job to come to these heavy, stuffy places, with their 1980s roccoco revival interiors and cocaine breaks in the bathrooms.

After her first date with Evariste at a city restaurant, Hunt had started worrying that she'd be followed back to Luigi's or to CID and had told her not to come into work. 

_I guess I didn't think of that when I got myself involved in this. _

It was bad enough that she was wearing this ridiculous clunky wire box, which certainly restricted her choice of wardrobe. Evariste had kept a polite silence at her insistence on wearing a heavy jacket in the too-warm restaurants, while around them other women were practically naked in their slip dresses and mini-skirts.

And what had Evariste told her anyway? She lied about herself easily (studying psychology at the University of London, daddy and mummy paying the bills at the moment) and he'd told her proudly about the various businesses he ran with his brother Marc. The club of course, but also two car-yards and a bookies. And this restaurant too, he announced on Tuesday night as they dined on langoustine imported from France, and she pretended to be impressed by the yellow and cream marbled walls, the long rows of white banquettes, the mini replica of the Trevi fountain in the entrance.

The next night, Marc joined them and Evariste had promised her a real East End night out. Walking down a deserted street in Docklands, Evariste on one side, Marc on the other, she hoped that wasn't a euphemism for something unsavoury. Although Chris and Ray, possibly Hunt even, were sitting somewhere near by in a car listening in, she was essentially alone on this street of derelict buildings. Posh girl, two bad lads, as Hunt would say.

The casino at the end of the Docklands street was concealed in the basement of an enormous echoing warehouse, below a commercial laundry – walk past the building in daylight and Alex would have assumed it was near condemning and awaiting the reinvention she'd seen a decade later.

Down echoing stairs to the basement, and her breathing grew heavier. Evariste went ahead and Marc's hand had somehow crept to her waist as if she needed steadying to walk down steps. Alex began to worry – the wire was sitting under her other arm.

* * *

What was wrong with him anyway?

They had stopped in his jaguar by a bus stop in Shoreditch at two o'clock, the spot she'd pre-arranged with the team. Ray would be there in ten minutes to pick her up.

Alex had hoped a quick kiss on the cheek would be enough for Evariste – she kept watching the entrance to the dark street for Ray's car, but it was empty except for a group of teenagers hanging around the opposite end by a park.

Evariste got out and came around to her side. It was a game they'd been playing all week – _Where do you live? Give me your address? Why can't I come to your home? _Alex sensed how quickly Evariste wanted to move. He was sweet, maybe Annette was right, but he also seemed quite relentless in finding out about every corner of her life. Every hour and the possessiveness he already seemed to feel grew. He offered his coat and Alex refused it briskly, still hoping Ray was smart enough to drive straight on if he turned up now – and she said, "You should really be going. My friend will be here soon."

Teasingly, Evariste replied, "I can't leave you alone. I want to wait around and meet your friend."

But the teasing grew into a choking cough and soon he was bent over the gutter, struggling for air. Alex tried to help him, hand on his back, and after a minute he leant back on the hood to catch his breath.

What was wrong with him?

"Please come home with me."

To Evariste she blushed appealingly. But she was thinking of the inevitable sniggers back in CID at this ridiculous plea.

Around the corner Hunt sat in the front seat while Chris turned up the volume of the recorder. There was silence.

"What do you think's happening?" Chris tapped the box. "God I hope it's recording properly."

"Shhh, I don't think it matters right now." Granger reached forward from the back seat and stopped his hands. "Sounds like they're kissing."

"Or he's too fucked to speak any more," Hunt said and got out of the car, ostensibly to stretch his legs.

* * *

Hunt had been called down to Stepney Grab-a-Cab. He was relieved in a way to get away from the hours of listening to the audio – not that he had to because Christopher had been hard to shift away from the recorder and it didn't take two of them to listen to Alex Drake prattle and lie to smooth over stunted conversations. Skelton had taken to the surveillance role so much that Granger had had to spend an hour persuading him to go home and shower.

But if he was being honest, he couldn't help himself either. If her wire was on he wanted to be there listening, even though it was making him feel unhinged. They'd heard nothing useful or incriminating. Worse than the lack of results was hearing her voice, smooth and usually so quiet, and often sweet, and then the silences of … he couldn't tell what … 

_Use your imagination_, his mother had used to tell him when he complained of boredom as a boy. _Well I'm bloody using it now. _

And hearing her through the wire, then dwelling on it, was worse than if he had to be there and see her being groped by those weedy little scum.

Anyway Dorothy wanted a word – he checked his watch. She'd had some thoughts on who might have been behind the murder of her beloved son, and could he come to the cab office?

Hunt was short with her. Dorothy might have all the time in the world to play with her tarot cards and think of ways to tease him, but he was sick of the games. The cab office, with its mismatched office chairs, ancient page three girl calendars and operator sitting out there with his thermos and fingerless gloves, told Hunt he was wasting his time. It seemed annoyingly perverse to pretend she was so small-time East End when her family had caused such mayhem on the streets outside the chirpy little cabbie office.

Dorothy started to flirt with him and he wouldn't have it.

"I interviewed Raymond Gage this week, and he says that your boys – specifically Marc – started the trouble on Connell Street." He paced in front of her, hands in pockets. Now was about the time Alex had arranged to meet Evariste Michaux at the Club Marseille.

"Why would we start trouble at our own bleedin' club?"

"You tell me." It was like she knew, like she was keeping him from getting back to the surveillance car and the wire recorder. It was making him feel ill and he pushed past the operator, knocking his thermos out of his hand, back to the Quattro. Noted the long key scratch across the red paint.

"I really must get around to calling immigration on that fucker," he muttered to himself and started the engine.

* * *

"Guv, you missed it." Chris urged him to hurry up and get into the unmarked police car parked around the corner from Connell Street and Club Marseille; put the headset to his ears. It was cramped in there, what with Ray and Granger sitting up high on their seats and straining to hear.

It occurred that if Vanderzee hadn't made his disappointment so clear, Hunt might have been able to beg a proper surveillance van off CID. But he assumed the AC had withdrawn his on-high favour as quickly as he'd given it.

"What did I miss?"

"I think DI Drake put the wire into the pocket of her coat and left it on the chair in the office. She must have gone to the toilet because that Marc started talking to some foreign bloke about setting up a hit on Raymond Gage over at a warehouse on Bachop Street. Just came out with it - bam - like that."

Chris played the tape back and Hunt listened to the plans, to Evariste's return to the room. Then some more dialogue. The conversation was lost every now and then in the opening and closing of the office door, but 'the foreign bloke' could be heard mentioning "smashing that Hunt's head in".

"That's Tutku," Hunt nodded at them without emotion. "I'd say he isn't best pleased at me stealing his bird away from him … well, turn the ruddy recorder back on then. Something else might be going on."

* * *

Dorothy entered the office just as Alex was leaving with Evariste. She barely glanced at Alex. _Guess I look just like any other of her sons' girlfriends. _

"Lately, when I walk in the room the conversation stops," Dorothy said. "What are you up to?"_  
_

Evariste quickly took her downstairs for a private word, and Alex picked up her jacket carefully, knowing the listeners would be groaning at the thumps and static coming through the headset. Marc looked down the stairs and then shut the door. They were alone, the only sound the thud of the beat from the club floor below.

Marc drew nearer. "You should hike that skirt up a bit. Everyone's wearing their skirts so short. You should too." With his hands clasped behind his back, like a naughty boy, he came closer. He had that twisting, skinny way of moving and the same teasing expressions as his mother. "You know … I'm just not sure about you."

"What do you mean?"

"Whether you're right for my brother."

They could both hear the stairs creaking as Evariste returned back up to the office, and Marc was smiling and enjoying, she could tell, the tension on her face.

"I watch out for my brother. I think I may have to keep an eye on you." One finger reached out to sweep along her bottom lip.


	7. Chapter 7

_**VII**_

Drake was down near the bottom steps at Luigi's entrance when Hunt caught her, taking both her hands and pulling her into the shadows. "You can't go in," he said, making sure they couldn't be seen through the door or the windows.

"What am I supposed to do?" Alex knew he had probably heard Marc's words – _I think I may have to keep an eye on you _– and everything that implied. In fact, she knew she'd been followed from the club. But she'd needed to talk with Gene and she hadn't seen him in a week.

"Dorothy Lange's inside," he said curtly and looking at her properly for the first time. "You can't go upstairs or over to CID."

"Where then?"

He looked like he needed time to think, had no answers for her. He sensed movement behind him. They both looked down at their hands still clasped together. Alex drew hers back immediately, felt dazed as he gave her a little push and she started to walk back up the stairs.

"Alex."

_Christ, Gene, tell me where to go ... _He said nothing._  
_

"Guv, go back in." She could see Dorothy at the bar, and Luigi's polite but rather perplexed face as he served her a gin and tonic. Alex made her way back up the steps quickly.

* * *

_I think Vanderzee should fire Drake. Should fire me. Should burn down Fenchurch East and start again. _

Nobody came near their table.

Luigi could not have looked more surprised when Hunt had run into the restaurant earlier that evening and hurriedly told him to keep an eye out for Drake. "If she starts coming down the steps, turn the music off straight away." He hadn't been able to keep the desperation out of his voice and his fingers had drummed on the bar until he knew Luigi understood.

When Dorothy had arrived and sat down at Hunt's table, he'd noticed the utter amazement on Luigi's face as he observed the new blonde woman. The generous slit in her knee-length skirt, bosom almost resting on the table, and her chilling smiles.

Then it had been Luigi's turn to call _him _over to the bar.

"I do not understand you, Hunt. Now you cheat on both Signorina Drake and the other Signorina."

"It's not like that. Jesus, do me a favour and I'll-"

"I'm a man. Fine. Men have a code."

But the code only went so far, it seemed. Yeah, Luigi had turned the music off when he saw Drake in her tight skirt coming down the stairs, but he did nothing an hour later when Lorna Albert entered the restaurant.

Hunt felt a bead of sweat trickle from his fringe down to his eye. Lorna waited for Luigi to make her Bloody Mary and then turned from the bar to look over at the corner table.

* * *

"I think I may have to go home and change." Hunt flicked tomato juice and a piece of celery off his suit jacket and stood to let the rest run down his pants to the floor. He escorted Dorothy to the front door of Luigi's and up the steps. As he turned to give Luigi the finger Tutku swung a meaty punch to his jaw, knocking him back into the angle of the door-frame.

"I fucking caught you out!" Tutku got a couple of frenzied kicks in as Dorothy screamed at him. Hunt slid to the concrete and Chris and Ray rushed to the door from their booth around the back of the bar.

* * *

Alex felt under the stone tortoise and smiled tearfully to find the key still there. Snatching it up, she glanced around before moving up to her parents' front door and opening it. Had she been followed here too? The night was silent as always here – no drunken 'here we go, here we go' midnight stumblings down the streets in this tree-filled suburb.

She could hardly breathe, stepping through the dark blue door into the front hall so familiar from the flickerings in her dreams. Everything left exactly as it had been when her mother and father had got in Evan's car for the short journey to her school and the train station.

Alex climbed the stairs wearily and then paused on the landing. Could she really sleep here tonight, in the bed her eight-year-old self had left so suddenly? She knew there in her bedroom, half her things would be missing, packed up by Evan weeks ago and moved to her new bedroom at his house. No, she couldn't face going in there – glancing through the half-open door to her room and the dim outlines of posters, toys, furniture she knew so well – that was close enough.

Alex opened the door to the spare bedroom and got in under the covers, fully clothed. This had always been such a cold home without the heating going constantly in winter. She could see her breath expelled in the air before her.

"Gene," she said in a whisper into her jacket sleeve, knowing the wire had probably run out of batteries and that he would not be listening anyway.

* * *

Was it the crackling of the wire's battery running down or her breathing? Hunt looked at Chris and knew he couldn't answer. Why wasn't she saying anything?

"DI Drake'll be too far away," Chris said. "The reception on this recorder's pretty umm small. She wouldn't have stayed in this vicinity, would she?"

* * *

Molly.

Molly swinging her legs as she sat on the end of the bed. Thump thump of her feet against the mattress. _Leave me a bit longer. I wish you would learn to sleep in so I can too._

"I don't want to play hide and seek now," she whispered into the pillow. But Molly ran over to the chest and climbed inside. If she hid, you had to find her.

"Molly!" Alex whispered hoarsely, sitting up in the bed and jumping at the strangeness of it. It only took a moment before she recognised the contours of the dark spare room, and heard the sound of slow creeping steps on her parents' staircase.

Sliding from the sheets she stood up, heart beating wildly as a flashlight shone down the hall past the spare bedroom's open door.

She obeyed Molly, lifting the lid of the chest at the end of the bed and lowering herself into it.

* * *

Dorothy shuffled the tarot deck – he'd broken her concentration so she needed to clear her head.

"I saw them outside the restaurant." Tutku always sat with his legs splayed open. A man who regarded his package as too large to close his legs. From his point of view smashing Gene Hunt in the face had been a good night's work. And letting her know that before she'd arrived for their date, Hunt had raced out of the restaurant with Evariste's new girlfriend, had a hurried conversation and then and sent her away quickly.

"I was watching them from the car, and I se everything. He was worried that you would see."

Dorothy put the cards back into their packet, regarded how he always slumped when he sat. He would develop a hump sitting like that. The image was repulsive.

* * *

She could breathe easily. The chest had curlicues carved right through the wood and she could even see through one to the wooden floor and Persian carpet. For half an hour she flinched at the torch light's beam cast here and there across the floor as the intruders crept about the house. Finally they stood in the hall right by the spare room's door. They didn't whisper – no one in the house to disturb, they thought.

"They don't have a safe."

"Have you checked among their papers?"

A moment. Then, "There's a lot of papers to check. Yes I had a reasonable look through."

"It's likely they would hide it rather than just have it with their normal business papers."

"Well downstairs is done. What about up here?"

"Ah well, their room, kid's room, spare room in here."

"Concentrate on their room. Time's running out. I'll look at the office again."

* * *

Alex could barely move, but she pushed the lid to the chest up with aching arms. She had cried silently through an agonising cramp in her leg at some time during the night as the flash lights continued to sweep along the hall, and she could hear sortings and the thwacks of papers being shifted about.

But they had left at the first bleak moments of morning light – slamming the door because it stuck sometimes on cold nights and could not be shut quietly – and Alex lifted herself up onto the spare room floorboards. Caught a look of her dishevelled self in the long mirror before the bed.

A car passed slowly off down the street and away and Alex stumbled along the landing and down the stairs, hands on the bannisters so she wouldn't trip. Nothing seemed disturbed, but she'd heard hours of their careful rifling and sorting and questions to each other, knew how they'd cynically reassembled the last quiet moments of her parents' lives.

In the kitchen Alex poured herself a glass of water and then replaced the glass on the shelf exactly as she'd found it, not sure why she was so careful. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and opened the lowest drawer under the kitchen sink. Like the front door it stuck in the cold. It was crammed with old recipes her mother had collected, but never had time to cook. With a tug the drawer dropped out onto the floor and Alex bent down to feel around in the space where it had been. Her hands found what the intruders had not – a file.

She lifted it out, just an ordinary manilla folder like so many she dealt with every day. But never with a file name like this printed on the front: Actaeon.


	8. Chapter 8

_**VIII**_

**I don't own the lyrics to Ever fallen in love by the Buzzcocks**

Alex Drake let herself out of her parents' house in the early morning. She stood there in the cold by the kitchen door, unable to think or plan. _What next? _

It was 7.30pm when she walked into the club and straight across the empty dance floor. Straight to Evariste, who had been watching the door. He kissed both her cheeks – his were so hot, and his face almost yellow under the strong strobes thrown down on the bar top. She drew back instinctively.

"You can't just disappear like that," he reached out to stroke her cheek. "I missed you today."

Annette's eyes were on her, dispassionate. Perhaps she'd been talking with Hunt that day – wondering where she had gone to. Alex had rung to leave a message for him with Shaz, but Shaz had seemed distracted by a suspect who had upturned Chris's desk and started shouting about police brutality.

_He should have got it. He should know I'm fine._

Evariste smiled, leaning his face on an elbow and studying her. "You look very sexy tonight." It might have been charming if he hadn't looked so damp and ill. "Did you go buy yourself a new outfit?"

"Actually I did." She'd driven into the city and wandered the shops for much of the day, looking for a change of clothes. _I'll let you think I dressed for you. _And she turned around for him – new jeans, new grey tank singlet under her jacket, new bag with the Actaeon file inside until she could find somewhere to hide it. It was a ridiculous outfit for winter, but she hadn't been able to concentrate in the shops, kept sitting down to open the file and try and make sense of it.

Still rattled by the ghosts in her parents' house. _Dead, and they still keep secrets from me._

"It's quiet here tonight."

"Shall we go then?" To dinner? To his flat upstairs? To her place? To bed? He was smiling and asking quietly but he persisted.

"No." Alex took a seat beside him. "No. Buy me a drink please."

The office above the dancing floor was mostly dark, but Alex knew Marc was up there behind one of those small keep-like windows.

Earlier the large empty club had been cold, now it was half full with the lights low and the music echoing. Now she had time to notice the tattiness of the place. The spilled drinks, stains in the carpet, the bad skin of the lads dancing in their ridiculous jeans.

All the time, there was Annette serving drinks and looking sullen and bored. Maybe it was the rain pelting down outside. Who would come out on a dismal, unlucky night like this?

Evariste stayed by her side for two hours, but finally he was called away to fix a problem with the sound system. After several minutes' of people milling about and murmuring about going somewhere else, the music came on again suddenly.

_You spurn my natural emotions / You make me feel like dirt / And I'm hurt  
And if I start a commotion / I run the risk of losing you / And that's worse_

Like clock-work figures winding, the people on the dance floor slowly worked themselves into the aggressive beat. She turned, but Annette had gone to collect glasses from the tables across the floor.

She was pulled into the store-room as she went to open the women's bathroom door.

* * *

"How many fucking bladders do you have?!" Gene panted, his hair and clothes soaked with rain. "I thought the hard part would be getting my arse in here," – nodding his head up to the small, now broken, window above the cleaning gear – "but I hadn't banked on you sitting there and throwing back fifty drinks without a let up."

He paused to shake the water dripping from his arm, frowned as she said nothing and brushed a cobweb from his other sleeve. He'd been brimming with righteous anger for an hour, watching through the small round window as she sat there, smiling and drinking and smiling and drinking.

A glass smashed out beyond the closed store-room door, and he ducked back into the space between a broom cupboard and a stack of drinks cartons.

"I've got to go," she said and glanced out through the door's small round window. Her bag with the Actaeon file was out there, and no doubt this place was full of thieves.

"Yeah that sick bloke's got …" His thought was off-colour and instead he reached out and turned the light switch. Alone in the dark and listening to the faint music.

_Ever fallen in love with someone / You shouldn't've fallen in love with?_

He'd meant to question her – _Where's that psycho bloke Marc? Have they said anything? Were you followed last night? Where did you go?_ But she was gently taking the wet jacket, drawing it from his arms and shoulders. Gene let her, not knowing where to turn his head.

"You'll catch a cold. Cheap suits do that."

"S'alright … It's not a cheap suit."

And then Alex laughed and whispered, "I know." He was shuddering with the cold. Cold in here, and …

"I think I'm in over my head." Her hand came to his cheek to stroke his cheek and stop any harsh words. He just tried to breathe.

Her hand stayed there even as his lips came to her mouth. His damp shirt chilled her, his hands on her bare arms.

"You're cold."

"It doesn't matter." There was a strange mix of feeling in her eyes - heart-broken and maybe joyful all at once. "It's a feeling. This is a feeling."

He kissed her again, broke away, and then again. Their eyes had adjusted to the dark, so he hid his from her as if the insecurity in his face would break the spell.

He wished he could have pushed her behind the stacked boxes, out of sight, a private place in this grotty little room with its drip, drip leaks. The anxiety – that a waiter or a punter would open the door – 'oh sorry' – and break them apart was making him crazy.

Hadn't felt like this since he'd been a teenager – the thrill of breaking into an empty house, the thrill of driving his dad's car off into the night, getting away with it. Speeding away. Crossing a line and knowing you could never go back.

Getting away with it.

He kept expecting her to break herself away from him, but she was driving him on too. He couldn't step back. She was so beautiful – it would bring his reserve back. But there was no going back.

The skipping of feet – someone carefree as they headed towards the door for their smoke break. Her hands left his waist. They both looked up, her face red from his stubble on his cheeks. The door opened. The light came on. A waitress looked around the room, sensing the movement of moments before when she'd sprung back from him.

"Get lost!" Just the demand was enough for her to scuttle out, and he slammed the door.

In a minute, Marc Michaux would know, Evariste would know. Later, Dorothy would know.

_I can't see much of a future / Unless we find out what's to blame / What a shame  
And we won't be together much longer / Unless we realize that we are the same._

_

* * *

_He left the Marseille quickly, walking out through the smoke and half-empty cold into the blast of the storm. He'd made her promise to follow and meet him at Luigi's. Had never driven so carefully, but never so anxiously, and he then had to wait on the empty street under Luigi's awning for five minutes, starring down at his boots because he didn't want to obsess about which direction she'd be coming from, or whether Chris and Ray would be inside, and just the sight of them would wither his confidence.

Or that Alex might not come. Or might arrive and just smile that smile that shot him down. And then how could he cover this with a joke now? Couldn't take it back, or pretend that kissing her was a ruse as he had in that underpass a couple of months back.

Wish he hadn't given her this time to cool down. She was passionate, and he closed his eyes at the thought. But …

A cab rounded the corner, and it was like a drug shot straight into his veins. The miserable persistent rain had been pouring down on her too – her hair was plastered about her face. Hunt flung money through the cab driver's window and pulled her onto the street.

"Come on. Here." He bridged the space between them instantly to reconnect with her skin, her lips.

_I've got to show her. _Nothing could have been more impossible than to slow down, to kiss her gently and take her hand. How was that possible when he'd had so many – he smiled into her mouth – filthy thoughts – and this had seemed ridiculous for so long.

A car passed, and they must have looked like something out of the ordinary, because the engine slowed, and he knew they were starring.

"Good god." She stepped back, hand to her lip, a little puzzled. "Brute."

Then he gripped her hand and ran her down the steps into Luigi's. _Come on, I can't wait._

Luigi jumped as the door slammed – and they came through the restaurant so quickly that his mouth was still open to sing out a greeting as Hunt pulled her up into the dark staircase.

His hands were pulling at the sleeves of her jacket, _take it off, take it off_, dragging her back down as she climbed the stairs in front. Hands on her hips, pushing her none too gently up to the landing, and running to catch up and kiss her again.

He had to show her – he'd held back so many times and he couldn't stand it any longer now. On the landing, and she felt in her jean pockets for her key.

Where was it? Frowning, his hands dug into her jean pockets to find it, went through her jacket too. Fuck's sake. God, there it was, and he pushed her aside a little to twist the key in the lock and get the bloody door open.

In the gloom, ignoring the jacket as scrambled over it. He was peeling his clothes off, had thrown them on the hall floor. She sliped over them and … fuck it. He drew a heavy breath and then fumbled at her singlet, helping her to pull it over her head.

Standing in the dark, his eyes acclimatised, but he could remember her body so clearly anyway. He couldn't slow down – couldn't seduce her slowly, couldn't be gentle. That would feel half-hearted, and he owed it to her to let her know how she desperate she made him. It felt like they were driven – forces outside that door were driving them.

He placed his hands on her waist and up to her breasts, hands on the lace, hooking under the wire, but she laughed and he drew back momentarily.

Why had she laughed? They were as they had been in that vault in Edgehampton once. Running out of air and he felt the same now. Oh god, he knew he was being too pushy. Looked too fierce as his eyes lit on the bra, making her stand back even though she'd never looked so uncomfortable and... the intimacy could be broken in a moment of embarrassment and he pulled her back to him quickly, suppressing any gentle thoughts as his hands tore at the button to her jeans and she jerked away.

What? Someone was pounding on the door. Hunt turned too, hand gripping her wrist quite fiercely. Went to the door, listened to the pounding again. He felt reckless, pulling it open even though he half suspected Marc Michaux would be there with a knife.

Luigi's white face was looking up from the top stair and they both turned to the slumped body of Tutku, sitting there like a delivery, in the hall.


	9. Chapter 9

_**IX**_

"I knew you were put on this earth to do me good, Tutku." Hunt flicked his bald head. It was distasteful, but as his hands had roughly gone through Drake's jean pockets, he now went through the dead man's. Luigi was exclaiming to his diners about _bluddy marder _and Hunt bent around to yell down the stairs that there was no point calling an ambulance. "Just keep everyone away, you tit." He exhaled out a long steady breath. Behind him Alex Drake had no doubt pulled a big thick jersey over the flesh he'd grasped so manically only moments earlier.

"I cost you your lady and you cost me..." Looking down at his hands the sense of her soft cold arms, the shiver across her shoulder as his fingers had begun to unhook her bra ... the sense was still there and the embarrassment across her face as he did so. It puzzled him now as he picked up Tutku's clammy hand. After the one-night stand with that Thatcherite arsehole, when it seemed like she'd have anyone (_anyone but me_) who bought her a drink at the bar, and the things that come out of her mouth … that she would be shy. What was that about? A compelling thought that drowned out his immediate questions about this stiff bastard and the blood pooling slowly under his arse.

"You've been dead a little while," he informed Tutku.

A shadow fell on his shoulder and he stood, remembering now he was in his trousers and singlet only. Hunt walked slowly back through her door and left it not quite closed. Her flat was still in darkness and she'd picked his clothes up. Yes, she had put the grey top back on and now handed him his wet shirt as if it carried the plague.

"Bolls, do you still have …?" Gene nodded to the bedroom where he'd kept a couple of shirts in the wardrobe for the nights he'd crash up here before her arrival.

"Oh." Alex went in and he followed. He didn't have a care now. Plonks would be here soon, so would an ambulance. All those ridiculous clothes that irritated him at work were tidily hung up in her wardrobe. It almost made him smile. And she gave him a bright white shirt and left him in there, among the scent of tea and lipstick, the unmade bed with its impression of a body passing a restless night.

Hunt heard Chris and Ray outside the door. Their voices were faded and he put the shirt up to his face. It was clean and smelled of washing powder.

* * *

Something was irritating her.

Alex stood back in her hall as the plods crowded over the body like students on a field trip, and Gilbert. the forensics man, strode up and down the stairs cheerfully fetching all the crime scene equipment. More and more people, and she tried to block out the fall of questions coming from Chris and Ray, and Hunt there carefully buttoning his cuffs.

Then it occurred to her and she spun around slowly, very slowly. In the rush to get out of the club, in the confusion as she had followed him from the store room, she hadn't brought her bag with her.

* * *

Marc had always hated this house. He pounded on the ruby and bottle green smoked glass of the front door and stepped back to look up at the first floor's bedroom window. "Come on, Mum! Where the fuck are you?"

Sure enough a light blinked on up there, then the hall light through the glass, and Marc laughed at the "keep it bleedin' down" coming from three doors away This was a poxy little street and yet she still insisted on living in the house her parents had owned, with its peeling rose-bud wallpaper and round plate paintings of shepherdesses and shepherds.

With all the money she was pulling in.

"Where's that Tutku then?" He pushed past her into the hall. "He said he'd meet me a couple of hours back. Is he lounging up there?" He motioned up to the landing – her bedroom, his younger brothers'. "Get that lazy Turk down here."

"It's bloody midnight, Marc." Dorothy tried to push him to the door – she'd shoved him around enough when he was a skinny, clumsy teenager – but he dodged her. "Or are you fucking that copper up there?" That made her look queer and he nipped up the stairs to find Didier and Achille at their bedroom doors, scratching itchy heads and feet chilled by the floor boards. Both too gormless to wear their slippers.

"Marc." She shut the bedroom door on him. "You're disturbing the whole fucking street. Now go home, and you can talk to Tutku in the morning."

"All alone." He made a pouty face at her bed, half slept in, half smooth bedspread.

"Oh you think you're so clever." Dorothy wrapped her pink silk dressing gown tighter around her middle. "You want to know who that cop's fucking? Probably that girl from the club that you and Evariste have been hanging about with. You and your idiot brother. How many dinners you both bought her? She's a police officer too." Dorothy reached for the cigarettes on her dresser. "You and Charles are just the same. You have these huge fucking plans, don't you?" She licked her thumb, something she did before the smoke went in her mouth. "Typical you, too. Trying to get what Evariste has."

"Leave him out of this." The news she'd just given him had stopped him short, but Marc bit that back and walked down the hall, ignoring Didier who tried to give him a playful slap. It was their play fighting and on another day he would have laughed. Just now, if the slap had connected, Didier would be on the floor with a bleeding face.

Dorothy looked down from her bedroom window as a car pulled up to pick Marc up from the street. Marc had always thought that big men should be driven around by their employees. It was only a poxy Cortina, and the friend was a little punk mechanic, but it was a start.

Down across the road under a street-light, her ex-husband Noel stood in his brown slippers, his whippet sniffing the footpath within the orbit of its lead. He waved up at her and Marc saw Dorothy smile faintly and waved back.

* * *

Almost black except for the blue light of the strobes – filled with cigarette smoke and the green scent of marijuana too. Alex pushed through the tight knots of people, the club floor so packed that dancing had given way to shuffling. And groping … she flung a hand from her arse and kept on until she could pass safely under the mezzanine. From that angle there would be no way Marc could see her through those square windows. And Evariste was not sitting at the bar. Head down, she passed between the groups of young men standing at the edge of the floor, unwanted, their eyes skimming the crowd, beers in hand.

Into the store room and she quickly closed the door and stepped around to the stacked boxes of drinks, almost laughing as she saw the bag still there on the floor. Bending down, yes the manilla folder was still in it.

The door clicked behind her.

Evariste had followed her in, but somehow he looked as surprised as her with a frown around his mouth and his sweet dark eyes. He turned to lock the door and she started back.

"This is for your own good." He glanced out through the round window. "Marc found out about you and he's been..." He stepped further inside, and one of his hands was tucked into the pocket of his jacket. "He's very angry."

_And you found out, too. _Alex had no pretence left in her and gathered the bag to her. But good lord, he put his hand to his mouth and made a strange sound.

"Evariste." She went up to him as he made the sound again, drew his face up towards her as he vomited up more blood into a handkerchief with dark stains on it. "Open the door, give me the key! I've got to take you to a hospital."

He wiped his nose, frowning a little. "I think he's been poisoning me."

* * *

Gene woke at the sound of her placing her keys carefully on the kitchen bench. Not moving from his hunched position on the couch, he felt rather than saw Alex step lightly past him. _Wondering why I'm here._ Crouching down before him in her white jacket, eyes even larger and more questioning against her pale face as she looked at him. He pretended to sleep on, holding his breath. _Not sure why._ There was something about the way she'd snuck out past the twenty police and forensic investigators that had annoyed him so much. Why did she do that? Just take off, and now here she was sneaking back into her flat. So untrustworthy. Through his lashes, he watched her rise away – seemed like she was holding her own breath so not to wake him – hang her bag over a chair, turn back to him and then take the bag away.

Where had she gone to? So that all the rest of them were left wondering. They'd spent hours on the landing before her front door before the body was taken away – the alarm on his watch had peeped three am a while back as he settled on the couch and closed his eyes – and he had fidgeted the whole time, wondering how Alex had just sloped off without anyone seeing.

As she opened her bedroom door and he heard it shut, he thought of the words from that Shakespeare play scrawled across the junkie's living room in the Bathurst Estates...

_But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft / Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon; _

_And the imperial votaress passed on, / In maiden meditation, fancy-free."_

She had translated the meaning for him in her typical patronising manner. _In my translation_, Hunt thought, _a woman is a cold-hearted tricky bitch._


	10. Chapter 10

_**X**_

She paused before pushing the office doors open – she felt fresh even with only three hours' sleep, and the uneasiness of knowing Hunt was just through the door on her couch, all hunched and uncomfortable. He must have let himself out of her flat early because when she woke at eight am he'd gone. She had lain there in her bed, thinking idly of what she'd do if he walked in, if he put his head on the pillow next to her face. But he had gone.

Perhaps that hurt a bit that he hadn't tried. But she remonstrated with herself as she dressed. _Perhaps that's the only reason you want to. Because he wouldn't. And you wouldn't._

The team had gathered together around Skelton and Carling's desks even though Chris and Ray weren't there. Hunt joined them and they didn't look at each other as the whole office discussed the gravity of the situation, an undercover that had got away on them. Annette was sitting there in her boring grey policewoman skirt suit – the mini-skirt gone forever now that she never had to return to the Club Marseille – reeling off questions. Who had killed Tutku? Who knew about Alex? Why was the body planted there?

Most of the team had known nothing about the operation, although they'd all sensed the excitement of it as it had preoccupied Hunt, Carling and Skelton for weeks. Now that it had all gone wrong, and there was no share of the blame for them she could see how thrilling it was for them. To hear about it ... to hear how it was all crashing down around them. To watch as she and Hunt avoided each other and sense the recriminations that would be coming their way.

Rodney, Lewis, Biro, Jimmy. They had all worked for other DCIs, for other DIs. She supposed that, in their stoical plodding ways, this moment did not seem surprising for them. Now that Annette was sitting there, furious and throwing those accusations about the room, perhaps it had always seemed as if some day she and Hunt would end up like this. Maybe they looked forward to a new DCI or DI, grey like them, giving them orders and keeping Fenchurch East out of the newspapers.

Viv opened the doors, hesitating a little. "AC Vanderzee's secretary just came down. You and DI Drake are wanted upstairs to speak with him. I think she said that CS Paulson would be there as well."

AC Vanderzee had never been known to visit their floor, his secretary neither. She looked at Hunt finally, across the questioning faces of their colleagues.

"Well," Hunt shrugged. "We messed this one up. I guess we're both going to pay now." He got up to put his suit jacket on, but the radio crackled. Chris's voice.

* * *

Ray bit on the skin at the edge of his fingernails, his eyes on the front steps to the hospital. He'd had to get out of the car to see anything – it was raining so persistently that the windows had fogged up and he couldn't bear the sound of the window-wipers a minute longer. He stood across the road from the hospital's street entrance steps. Ray had always avoided hospitals and doctors if he could help it, and it seemed unnatural that the people coming and going from the entrance could seem so oddly cheery and every day.

He'd rather be following Marc Michaux, like Chris now was, than be stood here outside a hospital.

Finally as the sky darkened noticeably, heavy with the weight of the intense grey clouds, Dorothy Lange walked down the entrance steps. Through the trail of careful cars passing between them Carling watched her wrap, rather than button, her raincoat around herself. She stopped – she'd been with Evariste in the emergency room for hours, he knew. He'd talked with a couple of the emergency room nurses, and even after a night of drunken stabbings and domestic assaults they'd been constantly discussing the man who would not stop vomiting up blood.

A car pulled up swiftly in front of Dorothy and a man got out. He held an umbrella over her and talked quietly, and she was listening intently. A new body-guard, thicker and uglier than that Turk who had turned up dead in Luigi's. She'd been crying – Ray could see that now. And she looked very tense, unrelieved by the floods of tears. Another son about to die and in a horrible, medieval way too.

His radio crackled and Carling stepped back into a doorstep to respond.

"It's Marc, he's on the move," Chris told them. "Pretty sure he'll be heading over to Gage's warehouse in Bachop Street. He's got a few little bastards with him."

And after a few seconds Hunt's voice. "Ray, Chris, get over there. I'll be there soon. Need to organise some back-up, but we shouldn't wait for plods."

* * *

They weren't late – it hadn't all ended in minutes like so many vicious encounters did, when the bodies would already be on the floor atop the pooling sticky blood when the police arrived. The entire street was empty and silent, the tarceal swept in a good inch of rain. The gutters from the wrecked brick buildings on either side of Bachop Street were overflowing – water pooled in the gutters and the leaves in the grates created dams, with winter torrents welling up to flow over the footpaths.

Hunt's feet were soon wet through his boots and socks as they stepped out of the Quattro and walked slow to meet Chris and Ray around the side of the warehouse. There were no visible cars, no one in sight. Gage's warehouse was seemingly locked up with its enormous roller-door padlocked at the bottom and the large windows empty.

The problem … he'd had no time to figure this out. Alex had told him as they sat in the Quattro that she had taken Evariste Michaux to the hospital that morning. So that was where she'd gone to, he sighed to himself. But he couldn't ask her why she had gone back to the club in the first place.

"We shouldn't go in," she said.

But Ray was cocking his revolver and had that tense look on his face – he was ready to go. The rain had extinguished the permed curl in his hair and it reminded Hunt of Manchester, and their old way of forging ahead, no matter the consequences. When there had been no Sam Tyler to tell them to stop … and think.

"No. Michaux could be inside already. I want to end this today with him and his minions under my boot. Case solved." But he knew as they left the car that they should hesitate. The momentum was driving them and so was the deep suppressed knot in his stomach as Alex ran ahead of him through the rain to where Chris, usually so cautious, was trying a side door down the alley.

The knot in his chest – so many fucking people with their feelings bruised, such a hateful situation. Wounded egos and smarting feelings.

"Come on." Ray's look was urgent and he barely waited for Hunt's silent assent before they entered the warehouse through the side door. It was an enormous space – in the morning gloomy light all they could see were the Victorian brick arches, dripping with rain that run through the leaky roofs down each storey to pool on the uneven concrete floor at their feet.

He stood just inside the door and Drake's breath was on his neck as he paused. Drugs, stolen cars, all would have been stored here by Raymond Gage, but not today. The huge space was empty and all the colder for it as they walked through the freezing puddles, the splattering sounds surely giving them away.

He now sensed it was a set-up, not for Gage, but for them. By Dorothy, who knew about him, by Marc too, who knew about Alex. They had been caught in the trap for weeks anyway, play-things for them. _And I thought we were entrapping them._

Into the office to the left of the side-door, Hunt knelt down behind the desk and spoke quietly into the radio. "Granger. How far away are the plods?" There was no answer and he swore. He heard a shot and scrambled on his knees to the door. He saw Drake running across the space to an arch as a volley of shots and shouting followed. "Christ! Come back!" He crouched by the door and then ran between arches to where Chris and Ray had ducked down. "We should get back outside. This whole thing fucking stinks." He radioed Granger again, heard her mumble something about CS Paulson holding off the back-up for them. They could be on their own.

He heard a clattering of feet down the staircase and then Marc's voice somewhere across the floor, menacing but quiet, as if talking to a lover. And he was.

Hunt fell over, swearing as they crept along the shadows at the edge of the wall. He saw a glimpse of them – Marc leaning over her. Where was her gun? Marc looked over at Hunt and laughed.

"What you want with that ugly old man?" Eh? Marc crouched down because she was crouching too, her jeans wet from the water pooling on the floor. Marc touched her face – he was too young for her but from the way he looked at it, if you were willing to kill for someone that was all there was to it. He'd left nothing to chance. Marc knew they were experienced, hardened bastards, and in luring them here he pretended he was only taking a car-full with him to the warehouse. But he'd called in ten others. He read the horror on her face as the men in their spotless white trainers, anoraks and jean jackets fell on Hunt.

Beyond that, what else? Would he kill her? What would he do? A couple of women he'd known and discarded would have been flattered by it. He had started poisoning his brother long before they'd met, but for her he'd finally decided to finish Evariste off. And for her...

Hunt understood and briefly saw the men who fired on them and then poured in. He met the flashing of their blades, knowing his arms would be cut to ribbons as he protected his head and chest. Ray had flung grasping arms from off his neck, and whirled around to tackle, falling to the ground into a tussle. Just like that, a number more stepped in and fell upon him with kicks. Hunt too was knocked to the floor and the puddles. He kicked out and reached for his gun, but felt hands wrenching it away.

* * *

"Wakey, wakey."

The bald head of Raymond Gage bent down close to his swelling eyelids. "You missed the fun."

Hunt lifted his head from the concrete slowly. Chris and Ray were sitting up against the wall, their faces red and crumpled. Skelton had that look, the sign of a certain broken set of ribs, and Carling looked angry still. Beyond Gage, a dozen men milled around in a loose circle, kicking their boots into the concrete.

It seemed … Hunt sat up, stifling a yelp of pain at the dig into his own chest. They had been saved by a pack of criminals from a pack of criminals.

There was no sign of Marc Michaux or any of those cowardly bastards who had set upon him.

"Where's DI Drake?" He struggled to his feet. Gage nodded to the office and through its windows he saw her sitting quietly in a chair, head down. "Help me up."_ My bloody clothes are sodden … again_. Hunt glanced at Gage. "I guess this time you were the cavalry." He looked at his watch, couldn't calculate how long he'd been unconscious. "What's happened?" Knew he'd never really find out.

As Hunt put a hand to his smarting mouth and felt the open wound on his lip, Gage told him, "Lucky for you I got a call this morning about some trouble going down in my warehouse." The floor must have been covered in blood surely, but now it was scrubbed clean.

"Who called you?"

Gage said nothing but he had a faint look of amusement about him.

Dorothy, Hunt thought, impressed at the grimness of it.

* * *

"You know, Gene." Dorothy drew the cubicle curtain around the bed. He sat above the hospital corner covers, face raw from the feeling of stitches and iodine, an aching arm bandaged. "You know, your lovely coat is ruined." It was too, shredded by blades and dirtied beyond repair. She wore a silvery fur coat herself against the severe chill that had followed this bout of torrential rain.

Beyond the curtain the sounds of a midday emergency room, with nurses enjoying the slackness of the pace before a night of drunks and domestics set in. Dorothy had come to her visit her son – and it seemed that the doctors now thought that despite the internal bleeding Evariste would probably survive, although the as-yet unidentified poison Marc had been feeding him had done some permanent damage to his organs.

Looking through the gap in the cubicle curtain Hunt noted her new body-guard. He looked homegrown, perhaps from the streets around Stepney, with the cauliflower ears of an ex-boxer and a crouched look in his matching denim jacket and jeans.

They let it be silent for a minute. It was probable no one would ever find Marc's body. She'd actually reported him missing. But for all that, Dorothy seemed chipper. _But then you've still got two more sons_, Hunt thought, and they were also out there by the body-guard, bored at having to visit their brother in the peeling grey hospital ward.

"What are their names again?"

"Didier and Achille." Achille – the name he would never be able to pronounce. Thin too, and with the first wisps of a beard on Didier's face, they looked like younger versions of Marc – pretty, just waiting for the viciousness to bloom.

Dorothy put a hand on his shoulder. "If you were my man, I'd buy you a new coat, a better one."

Hunt stared down thoughtfully at the hand on his shoulder – weighed down with rings, two to a finger, but unlike her face the hand and its prominent veins showed her age. "But I'm not."

"She's no good for you, you know." Dorothy had the right to say that, he supposed – she had saved his life with her phone call to Gage.

"That's what your tarot cards tell you?"

"No.' That snorting laugh again. "No, I don't need the cards for that."


	11. Chapter 11

_**XI**_

"This has been a horrible fuck up." The funny thing was, despite his obvious disgust at the outcome of the investigation into Dorothy Lange, Vanderzee seemed pretty upbeat about how the undercover had turned out. Bodies had disappeared, there was no way a report could be filed that made the Met come out with credit. But still …

Hunt stood at the window, looking down to the street view below. He'd never seen it from this angle before, from so high up. Luigi's entrance and the cheesy Italian lettering on the red awning. He could see the Quattro and how carelessly he'd parked it.

A fuck up was right. Dorothy had her streets back just as she wanted them and the recommencement of the uneasy truce with Raymond Gage. Crimes would still be committed in and around Stepney and money laundered through that decrepit cab company, but in Astley Square her ex-husband Noel would have no more trouble at the chippie from Marc's boys and kids would be let out onto the streets to play again until dark.

"We know what happened and you two are covered in anything but glory." But from the look on the Assistant Commissioner's face, the result was acceptable. Hunt glanced from the window to Drake, but she had tilted her head as if she sensed there was something more and her eyes cleaved to the expression on Vanderzee's face. There **was** more. The Assistant Commissioner opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out an envelope. From it he drew some black and white photographs and placed them side by side before her. He stepped back so Hunt could see too.

Ten photos taken over a minute of him and Drake on the street down below, when the dark night had poured and poured down a torrent of rain to soak their clothes. The first photo showing the cab driving away and the last Hunt pulling her down the steps to Luigi's. One photograph a close up of their kiss and her hands on his face as they stood pressed hip to hip.

"Alright, alright." Paulson scrambled to put the photographs back in the envelope.

_Thank you, Dorothy._ Hunt could only bite the nail on his thumb in lieu of being able to light a cigarette. Again he had underestimated her. Because how could anyone who read tarot cards and plastered on coral pink lipstick be so fucking clever? He could just picture the exact hiding spot the photographer had sheltered in to capture them on film.

"I don't have to tell you, do I?" Vanderzee looked from one to the other. "How inappropriate such a relationship is."

"It's not!" She stood up quickly, shaking the desk as she knocked it with her leg. "It's not a relationship." She put a hand to her mouth. Hunt thought that maybe it was the most embarrassed he'd ever seen her.

"You are the superior officer." Vanderzee smacked the envelope into Hunt's chest. "You know how bad it looks to have it as if you're pressuring someone who works for you into a relationship! At this bloody time too! Do you know how bad this looks? I can quite see how you managed to make such a horrendous mess of the investigation into Dorothy Lange when you have been occupied in something that would make you incredibly foolish if it got out beyond the walls of this office!"

"It won't." She didn't look at him, but he could see the determination set in her mouth, pushing him and the night captured in the photographs to the back of her mind. She concentrated her gaze on Paulson. She was right to - it was useless appealing to Vanderzee. "It won't happen again. You have my word." She looked desperate, like she would have taken Vanderzee's arm and shaken it to get through to him. "Please, Sir. It was a mistake and..."

Hunt let out a laugh at the heart-breaking tone of her entreaty.

"What about you Hunt?"

He really couldn't think of what he should say. _Get stuffed. None of your fucking business. _That's what he would have told them, but she had spoken so quickly, and so definitely just then. _It won't happen again._

Outside the AC's office, the secretary was typing a report and there was no thought of sharing that narrow couch. Alex stood against the wall, arms folded and straining to hear any of the discussion from within. Finally she came over to him.

"Gene, please." Yeah, she picked up the distrust he was feeling. What a stupid fucking place their attraction had brought them to. "Please talk to them, Hunt. Don't let them transfer me out. Explain that..."

At that moment he looked up - Paulson called him back into the Assistant Commissioner's office.

* * *

"Well the big boys won again." Alex had returned after an hour from the tenth floor where she'd spent thirty minutes alone with Paulson in his office. After a long wait Paulson had explained what had obviously already been pre-determined. With his tongue nervously running over his teeth, he told her he would be finding a transfer for her to another branch within the Metropolitan Police. It would not be a demotion, he assured her, and she would not be transferred outside of London. But she could read on his face that the position she would find herself in shortly would involve a lot of paper work.

And if she decided to make any trouble, there were numerous incidents he could document where she had acted inappropriately in her station.

She couldn't look at Hunt when he himself came back after a long absence. Most of the team had made themselves scarce, and the insensitive ones who **had** remained as she sat at her desk now exited too.

"You can get back to your usual business now," Alex finally said, sick of Hunt standing there by her desk. "Resumption of normal transmission. That's right, isn't it? I'm being transferred and you got a smack over the hand from Assistant Commissioner?"

He was kind of nodding, head down, and now he looked up. There was no sugar-coating it obviously. "He said I could keep my job or I could resign and …" He gestured to the space between the two of them. "And what am I supposed to do? You made it clear in your little speech..."

"Forget about it."

"Well fucking hear me out." Hunt came around the desk suddenly. "You know what? I was burning at the thought of getting the chance that night." He winced at the words. Yes, she agreed. They sounded clumsy. "And aside from anything else, I might have just resigned anyway to save what is left of my pride. But I am not a mug." He kicked the rubbish bin between them out of his way. "We probably caught a lucky break. Well I did. I wanted you, I admit it. But I know what the score is. It's a one-shot deal with you, and then I'm left the next fucking day with..." He swallowed the words back. "And you head off to find that daughter of yours without a thought."

* * *

_I don't have a choice,_ he thought after she had left the office and taken nothing with her, and the others had crept back, and the noise levels had crept up from church mice quiet to the usual bantering level, and he sat in his office with the door closed.

And later, when the lights were dimmed in his office, and he'd checked across the road to see her flat dark as well … then he'd taken out the envelope, which in the hurriedness of Vanderzee to get away to a lunch engagement he had been able to take from the Assistant Commissioner's desk. Hunt had hardly paid attention to the photos as they had been laid out carefully but now he was almost thankful for the quality of Dorothy's photographer. The deep, dense black and white contrast in the picture – the moment caught in time of their eyes closed and his arms around her so possessively. Staring at them reminded him of how badly she had been betrayed, but it gave him a dull thrill too. If he came to believe it was a mistake, and that she was just using him, he could look at the photographs and the passion caught with some anonymous bastard's SLR.

There was quiet knock on the door. Chris asking about whether they should all head over to Luigi's? _No_, he thought, _not there_. "You know, Christopher. I am sick of Italian food. I feel like a pie, a pint and a song at the piano."

* * *

Christmas decorations had gone up today all over the shops on London's malls, and high streets. It was December the third. Luigi had pulled out his own nativity scene and set it at the end of the bar – finger-high delicate dolls of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, shepherds, a tiny manger and kneeling sheep. Maybe he'd brought it from Italy.

She had never played Mary in the nativity scenes at her Sunday school. Unlike her parents, who had never taken her to church, Evan had decided she would attend Sunday School at the local Anglican church, at least until she was old enough to start arguing about the sexism of the Bible and the existence of God himself.

_I was sometimes an angel_, she thought, studying the wooden doll of Gabriel with its neatly painted gold halo and folded white robe.

"What's Italian for merry Christmas, Luigi?" Alex was getting up to leave and the restaurant was empty anyway although it was a brilliant, crackling winter night out.

"Buon natale."

"I thought it was something like that." She picked up the wine bottle off the bar and steadied herself for her walk back up the stairs. "Is it too early in December to wish you a buon natale?" He seemed melancholy himself, and perhaps a little drunk also. He didn't answer. "Enjoy your evening, Luigi." She felt sure tonight that he would be left alone by the CID team.

In her flat, with only a floor-lamp on to illuminate the lounge, she opened the folder and put it down on her coffee table, not caring how cold it was. She began to concentrate. 'Actaeon' printed so neatly on the cover in stenciled letters, exactly like the letters 'Artemis' on the file Hunt had hidden somewhere. Until now she had never thought much about whether he had taken the file, which she had only seen once, from that vault in Edgehampton. But now as she concentrated she was sure he had taken it.

Artemis and Actaeon – it was all she wanted to think about.

_Concentrate. Analyse. Make a connection._

_**Hi again****. If you want to keep reading, the next story in the series is In Paradise**__**.**_  



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